What makes a successful piece of art? Selling it for a whole lotta money would be the most popular answer straight away, and some folks stop there, but art is deep and wide and has functions other than keeping someone’s money warm. The painter decides, first of all, if work still on the easel satisfied their intention, fulfilled the potential in the idea, and overall makes a strong unified statement. For a typical painter, out of five paintings probably one doesn’t quite get there, one turns out surprisingly well, while the middle three represent the artist just doing their work.
Thinking like the artist would help you sort them out, pick the best one to take home. Painters do not think like scholars, they use different mediums, live on different planets. The scholar starts way back reciting the linage by contact of ‘studied under’ artists back to someone in the pantheon, and lived in the same town with someone famous must have used the same laundromat, such as that. Then they start analyzing the image for fatal clues, the spider-like motif in the brocade tablecloth indicating the young lady was a prostitute, there’s lots to know. Abstract art lets them soar.
Painters are more concerned about tonal relationships, tablecloth against the dress, the cohesive completeness of object and background, and a mood and attitude that comes through when they paint, don’t know why. Whatever their style, they’re attempting to bore through your battle-hardened forehead, armored against the streaming myriad of images tugging at your sleeve, poking for your groin, telling you outrageous lies just to get you to buy their thing, it’s everywhere. People hardly notice nothing these days, and it’s a challenge. The image, abstract, fantastic, tangibly realistic, whatever, that causes someone like you to pause, that focuses your attention, that doesn’t try to answer its own question, is the grail of visual art, from the inventive graffiti artists who tag the boxcars to the painter working in the vacancy over the store hoping one day to shed the day job.
Thinking like the artist would help you sort them out, pick the best one to take home. Painters do not think like scholars, they use different mediums, live on different planets. The scholar starts way back reciting the linage by contact of ‘studied under’ artists back to someone in the pantheon, and lived in the same town with someone famous must have used the same laundromat, such as that. Then they start analyzing the image for fatal clues, the spider-like motif in the brocade tablecloth indicating the young lady was a prostitute, there’s lots to know. Abstract art lets them soar.
Painters are more concerned about tonal relationships, tablecloth against the dress, the cohesive completeness of object and background, and a mood and attitude that comes through when they paint, don’t know why. Whatever their style, they’re attempting to bore through your battle-hardened forehead, armored against the streaming myriad of images tugging at your sleeve, poking for your groin, telling you outrageous lies just to get you to buy their thing, it’s everywhere. People hardly notice nothing these days, and it’s a challenge. The image, abstract, fantastic, tangibly realistic, whatever, that causes someone like you to pause, that focuses your attention, that doesn’t try to answer its own question, is the grail of visual art, from the inventive graffiti artists who tag the boxcars to the painter working in the vacancy over the store hoping one day to shed the day job.
1 comment:
Your essays - spare, sculpted, visual - share more with poetry - and art - than the art commentary I'm used to. Refreshing to get it from an artist rather than a "critic".
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