art’s efficiency -- simple means

Making art is about efficiency -- making simple means go farthest. These days it’s possible to digitalize and manipulate images, change color with a stroke, borrow from anywhere, print on anything, so why is the Mona Lisa still a thing? Why would modern people bother with painting at all?

Painting is caveman basic. Ground minerals suspended in oil are applied to stretched fabric, light and portable. It’s meant to be hung on a wall, perhaps embellished with a frame, and a discreet source of light would be helpful. There is no alien technology filched from a crashed saucer, actually there’s nothing new at all. It’s a system largely unchanged for thirty five thousand years we know of, the application of pigment to a flat surface representing the world in two dimensions.

The implements used have largely remained the same as well, animal hair at the end of a stick being the most common, and mediums have improved but still serve the same function, beguiling the eye. Primitive maybe, but not a bad place to begin if accomplishment is measured in sheer distance from start to finish, from materials utilized to statement made. It’s about efficiency, the guiding principle of an artist's life, anyway. Will concede the popular image from movies and such is one of cocaine and limos, artists rich like their patrons, but it’s a sad fact that the artistic community waited a couple of decades longer to take hot showers than everyone else, and it hasn’t changed that much. Independent artists live on the edge, and don’t waste nothing.

Technology, it turns out, is a six dimensional crutch, the kind of kinetic assist that leaves the body weak and wasted, statements posted on endlessly updating platforms, as unsuited for significant art as scratching love letters in the sand. It’s so much easier, in the long run, to start further back up the road where’s there’s less traffic, more miles to roam. Visual art made on an easel already represents a different time-scale, a concentration of effort and attention on an instant, a momentary glance otherwise destined to be lost in the flow of a day’s passing. By convincingly portraying actual experience, the painting establishes a portal on memory that widens each time it’s seen, an enduring image that seems to expand with familiarity, to reveal more with time. That’s old school. 

Vision and talent make the job easier, but diligence and effort crank the process over, condensing a moment’s observation into a tangible, visible chunk you can hold in your hand, hang on your wall. What make it good? A simple answer is miles down the road, how much depth of feeling and sense of presence can be wrung from simple stuff. This becomes the greatest efficiency of all, producing an object of significance and value almost from thin air.