Friday, September 29, 2006
October 5, 2006
Check this out: Why the Nude? at the Art Students League of New York.
I found this while looking through my collected papers and postcards from Chelsea a couple of weeks ago, and I saw this image of Reclining Nude by Sharon Sprung. Compare and contrast to my painting, I Live Next to an Endless Party. The two paintings are almost exactly the same size (mine's a bit larger).
I don't want to say her painting's better, exactly, but it's certainly more. More what? Academic, traditional, technically accomplished, I guess. I want to say all these things without implying that there's anything inherently derogatory about them -- or anything inherently complimentary. Her painting is what I would have liked to paint, if I could have, which I can't, because I don't have the academic background. That said, I've transformed -- through a complex internal alchemical process -- my naivete into a virtue. My painting is more realistic, I think, in that it shows what's actually there, what you actually see, instead of the academic illusion we've all come to accept as "realistic" painting. The fact is, no human being has ever been as perfectly lit and posed as depicted in Sharon's work.
Of course, I'm wrong. Sort of. I mean, in the end, my naivete is not a virtue. I simply haven't had the training. I don't know if I want the training. When I start painting I'm aiming for that academic look, but I don't get there, and I'm not sure how much is because I don't want to and how much is because I just can't. And I don't know if I could, even if I did take the classes.
Anyway: The show and symposium sound really interesting. Why the nude? I ask myself that. A gallerist I showed my drawings to said they really loved my lines, and would like to see my lines applied to a different subject. I've given this a lot of thought and I still can't think of anything I'd rather draw than naked people. What should I draw? Fruit baskets? Sides of beef? Trees? To me, finally, all art is about human beings.
> I really wanted to post this tonight but blogger is "experiencing some
> difficulties". It is for the comment at your recent "plan ahead" post. I
> will try again tomorrow.
Good. I hope you get it up.
> I can't believe I'm commenting on this at this hour. I'll never do it
> justice. I think you've got a long comment thread here. What I instantly
> feel from this post is something that I haven't defined, and yet want to =
> Academic training has nothing to do with experience. Experience is the only
> thing that can teach you. Don't blame the academy. I have been through a
> liberal-arts undergrad and a fantsy-pants painting graduate program and I
> never EVER have had anybody show me how to mix blue and yellow. No teacher
> or professor ever showed me how to clean my brushes. Doesn't that mean I'm
> a self-taught painter?
Perhaps you haven't been academy trained. When I say academy, I don't just
mean a BFA and MFA program. I'm talking about the very specific training
you can get in a real old-fashioned art academy. You know, where you start
with plaster casts and work your way up to life drawing and don't touch
paints for years. I'm talking about what the Impressionists were rebelling
against, going back as far as the old apprentice system.
My understanding is that these academies still exist. I hear there are
hundreds, if not thousands, of painters who can dash off near-perfect
Rembrandts and Raphaels.
What I'm talking about is the craft of painting, apart from the art of
painting. You can learn craft through experience, but if you're teaching
yourself -- either because your MFA program isn't teaching you this stuff
or because you skipped art school entirely -- you're going to spend a lot
of time wandering down dead ends and reinventing the wheel.
Not that I, by and large, consider that a bad thing. I've said before that
I'm an autodidact. I generally learn better by doing and I'm wildly
impatient with any system requiring gradual steps. I've never learned
anything by starting on page one.
That said, there are times when I feel my lack of knowledge keenly. I know
there are problems I've encountered which have already been solved. And
I resent having to work through them myself when certainly I could have
been taught through them instead.
> And then there is the guilt in objectifying the female form. Curate a show
> called "Truth and the Male Gaze".
I don't feel guilty about objectifying the female form. Women ARE objects,
after all. So are trees, fruit baskets, and sides of beef. But women are
not JUST objects. I think there's a difference. So I don't treat women
as JUST objects, but in my drawings and paintings, they're objects. I
happen to be more interested in them than in other objects.
To me, what makes humans interesting is that they're more than objects.
We've been programmed by evolution to respond more strongly to the human
form than to any other object. In particular our brains respond much more
strongly to facial features than to any other arrangement of objects. Look
at how often we see faces in random phenomena like water stains, clouds,
or rocks on Mars.
When I draw I'm tapping directly into that programming. I take advantage
of it so that my sparse arrangement of charcoal on paper is transformed
into a reclining naked woman. I couldn't do what I do without the billions
of years of programming built in to the human nervous system.
And human bodies are wired more tightly into our brains than any other form,
so they're fun to play with.
> Do you think that you could draw something that reminded me of a fruit
> basket, a side of beef, and some trees? Oh, and be sexy too?
Maybe.
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