So, thinking of paintings made with mammary glands reminded me of this work I’ve read about lately. So, Pierre Brassau did four paintings for a show in Sweden, which received rather consitently good critical review. Mind you, Pierre Brassau turned out to be a chimpanzee, who did in fact paint the works for Åke “Dacke” Axelsson, a journalist with something to prove to the art critics. Now that’s a stunt.
Hit the link below to read the full details. Something to think about while we ponder how much the stunt makes the art.
Found on Reddit, painted by someone's girlfriend's roommate's breasts
So, I have really no details about this (other than being done by a 21-year old Caucasian gal with 36B cup size using non-toxic paint and her breasts) painting. I found it today on the Reddit, from user “marblecakes” (click the image to skip to his profile). So, all shock factor aside (and chances to use words like ‘knockers’ seriously on my site), how do we process a painting like this? I mean, it’s attractive–I rather like it–but, without the context of the execution, is it worth anything? Knowing the context, is it worth anything even then? I’m unsure, actually, but it was enough to catch me off-guard.
Anyway, I’m not even sure where to start with this. If you’re unafraid of the internet, or are otherwise unphased by staring down 500+ Reddit comments, you can find the full comments on it here. And then, hey, hit me up in the comments with your thoughts, and maybe we can figure this thing out.
So, let’s get it out of the way: there is no doubt in my mind that artists who work in a photo-realistic style– that is, in a style that without immense scrutiny is indiscernible from real life or a photograph–have immesne and extraordinary talent, and deserve all due recognition for it. But, other than feathers in the cap for technical skill, I don’t get the point. Technical skill does not itself make art, if it did Flickr’s approximately 18 billion technically flawless macro shots of flowers and elapsed landscape shots of water crashing on rocks would seriously threaten Christie’s business model.
by Juan Francisco Casas
And that’s because—for photography, at least—we’ve accepted that technical merit alone does not equal art. It equals technical merit, while art is retained for something that captures an idea, emotion, or moment. So why is photo-realism in painting, a medium that long ago abandonned capturing life verbatim once the camera tripped onto the scene, so popular right now?
Don’t get me wrong, artists like Diego Gravinese and Juan Francisco Casas (both pictured, linked, and found on Artist A Day) make good images. I’m just saying I’d like them identically as photographs and not just paintings (or ballpoint pen drawings) that look just like photographs. Again, other than the “oh wow” factor, which is transient, I don’t understand what this retrogressive technique adds to the image.
I suspect, whatever the artist’s intentions, the popularity has to do with the notable trend currently of ditrusting anything but the most authentic image, because of a fear of forever being lied to spurred by the digital revolution. It’s popular currently to cling to the insane notion that there’s an ‘honest’ way to create images that doesn’t distort, alter, edit, and lie the moment you frame a slice of infinite, 3 dimensional life elapsing in time into a single, 2 dimensional frame. Which, I also don’t understand. But, I welcome your thoughts and debate on the subject.
So, I don’t talk often about the tools of the trade here, because I don’t especially think they’re as important to discussions about art as, you know, the art. Put too much emphasis on the tools and you end up with the DPReview forums, and that’s a level of banality I don’t wish to encourage.
That said, I think I might on occasion now stop to say some words about a few of the tools I think are worth noting, starting with the color known as ‘phthalocyanine blue.’
I was first introduced to phthalocyanine, or ‘thalo’ for short, in the late 90′s by my after-school art instructor Melanie Richwine. But, it probably wasn’t until my time in Painting 1 in college when I started developing the appreciation for the color I have today.
According to Ye Olde Wikipedia, it’s a pretty recent addition to the artist’s palette, when you consider that some of the classic pigments have remained more or less the same for many hundred years. Thalo, though, has apparently only been with us since the 1930′s. Apparently its discovery happened twice, both by accident, and the second time happened to be at a Scottish dye factory, so it was followed up on. Learn something new every day.
Thalo, in use, is an interesting hue to work with. It’s the richest blue in the palette, period. It’s amazingly potent, verging on and often waltzing across the line to over-powering. It’s a translucent color, which makes it very useful for glazing. Even thinned out, it remains amazingly rich and vibrant. And, I find it useful. Just a touch of it on a palette knife when mixed with titanium white will yield a hue very similar to cerulean, and it’s useful for mixing in a variety of other situations as well.
Since it’s largely translucent, but nonetheless rich and dark, I find it useful as a glaze to layer richer shadows, or more nuanced cool- shifts into paintings.
Artists, as a lot, are known for accepting quite a bit, and justifying quite a deal of nonsense. Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Piero Manzoni, Andres Serrano, Joel-Peter Witkin– you dig around in art long at all and you’ll find plenty of questionable, weird, misunderstood, or inflammatory works that many artists will bend over backwards to not only justify, but to revere.
Andy Warhol, "Che"
And then there’s Andy Warhol, the one man who everyone seems to find it OK to hate. And, worse, it seems that the reason there’s so much hate for Warhol doesn;t usually come down to some of the morally questionable things he did in life–no no. People hate Warhol because of how often his style is imitated.
It’s a strange disconnect. Warhol, known for his Campbell’s soup cans, and probably more despised for his multi-color screen prints of celebrities, is almost without a doubt the representative face of the pop art movement. But, it’s not for his actual works (his iconic work of Che is just that— iconic, and still popular fodder for t-shirts among the very people who like to scoff at the work of Warhol today), but for the fact that they’re such a simple, striking visual style that is copied almost without end and almost always without purpose.
Is it fair to hate someone because of the drivel their work inspired? I don’t think so. Not even if you weren’t particularly fond of the original work. Warhol’s work may now seem strikingly obvious and bombastically simple, but it’s worth noting it still wasn’t done before Andy stopped to do it. Whether or not you like it, his pop art had a way of embracing the ephemerallity of media that gives it merit. Imposters and advertising groups like to ride the coat-tails of the instantly recognizable visual style, but none of them seem to understand the almost black humor involved in Warhol’s originals.
Looked at another way, hating Warhol for the hollowness of modern ‘pop art’ would be like hating Tolkien for the loads of derivative troll-and-elf fantasy that we’re subjected to. I pikc this particular example because I am, personally, as unthrilled by Tolkien’s classic works as many people are with Warhol’s works, to illustrate that the difference between artistic merit and enjoyment is one worth noting.
And all you artists out there deriding Warhol for his artistic works, shame on you. I expect better. If you must hate Warhol, he’s got plenty of questionable actions in his biography to work from. But his art, whether you like it or not, is an interesting and worthwhile addition to the history of art. To provide a point of contrast, if nothing else.
While I’m thinking about archival concerns, it seems as good a time as any to bring up my personal affinity for art and the ephemeral. We’re not talking like the Futurists here, no, not expecting something to last and purposefully making sure it doesn’t is a bit of a difference.
But, it does seem to me there are only two sane ways to approach art: as ephemeral or as universal. Either the work is transitory, focused on being relevant when it’s created and damn future generations if they can’t read a history book, or it’s designed to always be approachable, usually at the cost of bordering on cliché (and often failing to properly hook it’s contemporary market).
Me, I like the ephemeral. I was never particularly thrilled with the subjects of most old master paintings. Did they have amazing, spectcular painting skills that are so rarely seent hese days? oh my yes. I’d still rather have a Basquiat. That’s me. I think art is always evolving, shifting, changing, exploring, and growing. As such, I think it’s important to embrace a certain ‘nowness’ to art. History has its place, but not in my studio.
Am I the only one who prefers a good latex primer to gesso? I mean, as far as things go, I don’t think anything designed to cover crayon and seal moisture is going to be less ‘archival’ than gesso, really.
Given the price difference between a 1-coat primer and even the cheapest gesso, I’m going to guess I’m probably not.
I have to admit that I generally find artistry to be a solution to a problem. I bring this up, as usual, coming from photography. Photography is one of the mediums I have the hardest ttime accepting as art, and it’s partly because so often there’s no solution to the problem. Cartier-Bresson made reference to the facty himself, there’s only a split-second in which a photographer is an artist, and that’s knowing when to hit the shutter. There are exceptions to this, there are always exceptions, but I think the current photodocumentary whiplash against digital manipulation removes the artistry from photography. The idea that we should meddle with, control, accentuate, and sometime blatantly lie about the scene we were presented has always struck me as where the artistry in photography is.
In painting you don’t get these quandries anymore. There has always been a problem (how to represent a complex visual world using paints and small clumps of hair on a stick), and the whole of the discipline is a way to overcome these limitations (glazing, various stroke styles), and, at its zennith, to alter the visual plane, or to create a new one altogether. It has long now been accepted in painting that the end work is a statement of the artist, and that their decisions andmethodologies completely alter the perception of the same scene.
Give three photographers three brands of cameras and the same scene and you’ll get three enarly identical visions of the same scene. Sure, you can choose lenses, and framing, but ultimately a camera is a device designed to record without bias. There’s no vision, it’s just a recording. Now, once you start getting beyond what the camera can do on its own, however, once you exceed its dynamic range, or its sensitivity to light, well, now that’s a different story. Now the photographer has to step in and make decisions. There are problems that it becomes necessary to solve, and should they prove insurmountable there are lies that need to be made. There’s almost no artistry to using a camera on program mode in good light. It runs on autopilot and out come pictures. Start adding things like bounce reflectors and off-camera flash and the world gets far more difficult.
To the forum troll I read once who said his vision does not have noise in it, I tell you that you’re a mere documenter, a recorder. To those of you who look at life like a canvas and a camera like a brush, an instrument to wield to your own purposes, well, now that’s where I start calling you an artist.
In college I had to go through a series of staged classes that focused on the basics of composition, with a focus on gestalt and Notan and similar “pure design” foundations. So, I have to admit, as I’m helping some friends understand the basics of composition to better their photography, and I can’t find any good texts that explain composition without linking it to one medium or another. There’s no text that says “Hey! This is composition as it applies to all 2 dimensional art!” And I think that’s a pity.
So I’m going to work on writing one, I think. Now, to go back and brush up myself on the formal principles and elements. It might be the designer in me, but I really think recognizing the general aspects– the building blocks, if you will– like line and shape and hue, well, I think that’s more important than knowing what pthalocyanine blue is, or how EV comp affects noise, or what the hell conte crayons are.
