A question. Do you believe in the concept of quality? I love my daughters paintings, but they lack the quality of what you are terming "fine art". Sure, you can like what you want, but if what you like lacks quality, expect people to not value your opinion highly.
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Who are your favorite and least favorite painters?
- Thread starter Tricky
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A question. Do you believe in the concept of quality? I love my daughters paintings, but they lack the quality of what you are terming "fine art". Sure, you can like what you want, but if what you like lacks quality, expect people to not value your opinion highly.
I also hate Kehinde Wiley, and David Nordahl the guy who made those awkward Michael Jackson portraits, and the the guy who paints the covers for the Watchtower pamphlet (I don't who who it is, but they all seem to come from the same art school).
They are realistic, too much in fact, they lack soul and taste, they remind me of propaganda paintings from North Korea.
They are realistic, too much in fact, they lack soul and taste, they remind me of propaganda paintings from North Korea.
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Scopedog
Muse
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Yes. This is quality robot art:
Yuji Kaida
Yoshiyuki Takani
Kow Yokoyama
Kunio Okawara
roger
Penultimate Amazing
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Well, to address van Gogh briefly (note capitalization and spelling (I know, elitist)). Everyone painted in a time and place, and it is, I suggest, important to understand the time and place that somebody worked in. If I cranked out some two part inventions they might be good - but Bach had the genius to turn such things into an art form. My music might be good, but I am just copying his brilliance. Or, take the wheel - the person who invented it was an incredible genius, whereas the mechanic that replaces my worn down tires not so much. Well, that analogy is overstretched, but perhaps you take my point?
van Gogh was painting in a time and place of a very dark palette, very fine brush strokes, etc. Everybody was copying everybody else. Dull, dull, dull. van Gogh would go out to the farmside, and try to paint the farmers in the fields, their wives in their run down huts. He'd try to capture the effects of the hot sun after you've been in it for hours. he'd try to capture the poverty and hardship, yet worthwhile lives these people were living. Little, finicky brushwork with a brown palette just wasn't the technique to achieve any of this. I strongly suggest reading his letters to his brother (they are collected in a book) - he quite clearly strains and fights with the medium, trying to articulate (so to speak) what he was seeing and feeling with the paints that were available to him.
I think he succeeded, brilliantly. No one else was painting like this, and it was hardly a gimmick (no sales). He fought to express himself, and choose a palette, brush work, and so on to do so. He innovated, in a way that very few have ever done in the art world. You may or may not personally respond to a seemingly crudely painted picture of a farmer's wife hunched over in a squalid room, and that is fine, but I do suggest looking at the context of the painting. That was probably the 300th one that he painted (and paint, canvas, etc were dear in those days for somebody without a job), and was still only hinting at what he wanted to achieve. Paint, poetry, and other mediums are very difficult indeed - how do you capture all the nuances of a farmer in the french countryside without it being overwrought, stylized, maudlin, or what have you? I think van Gogh found a new, and convincing way of doing so. (n.b. I'm overly concentrating on his time at Arles for the sake of brevity. Obviously his life was more complicated than his time in the south of France, but it takes books to explain his life and art - there's that nasty requirement for education again)
I don't much enjoy the later music of Miles Davis, but I must admit that he reinvented jazz&music multiple times in his life, and that his later work was brilliant, if not something I chose to sit and listen to very often. His work moves others, and I can understand why, on an intellectual level.
You may not enjoy viewing van Gogh all that much, but please recognize that he spent every day agonizing over how to express certain ideas (again, very well documented in his letters to his brother Theo), and devoted his entire life to it, in the face of enormous criticism and rejection. He didn't just grab a paint brush like a monkey and splash paint on the canvas with a heavy hand.
What do I base my points on? Well, I've read several biographies on him, I've read his translated letters, I've tried to see every painting of his in person that I could, and I am still woefully uneducated about him. I mention this in reaction to cries of 'elitism' and such in that other thread. What is wrong with learning about a subject before feeling competent to opine on it I'll never quite understand.
Is his the kind of work you'll glance at and say "ohh, pretty light"? Err, no, probably not. But it's the kind of work that rewards years of study, and requires knowledge of not just his work, but the work that preceded his, the state of dutch art at the time he started painted, his associations with other artists, the revolution in art going on at the time in Paris, the complicated relations he had with his brother, etc. He changed the world of painting, forever, and that counts for so much more than a three second glance at, say, "Van Gogh's Chair" and going "eww, the perspective is off" or whatever. Your child may well be able to paint straighter lines (and so could van Gogh, he was an excellent draftsman), but your child probably has not rubbed elbow with just about every talented and striving artist of their generation, and spent their lives trying to express what is inside of them in a way that is novel, inspired, and worthy of prolonged study in several hundred years.
I love so many but here are my top three:
I think with great pleasure of Titian's portraits with the beautiful young men, the ravishing renaissance dress of the young women and the keen studies of ancient ecclesiatics.
Also of the light shining into Vermeer's spare and elegant seventeeth century interiors (which I could happily inhabit today).
I think my favourite painting is Jan Van Eyck's The Arnolfini Marriage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnolfini_Portrait
Artists I get irritated by? The not-terribly-famous-yet perpetrators of huge, deliberately coarse-grained works or installations that scream for attention in galleries of post-modern art and sometimes require you to read an accompanying statement of the artist's philosophy.
The little rant above reminded me of an artist who worked in a diagonally different tradition: Hiroshige. Do look him up.
I think with great pleasure of Titian's portraits with the beautiful young men, the ravishing renaissance dress of the young women and the keen studies of ancient ecclesiatics.
Also of the light shining into Vermeer's spare and elegant seventeeth century interiors (which I could happily inhabit today).
I think my favourite painting is Jan Van Eyck's The Arnolfini Marriage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnolfini_Portrait
Artists I get irritated by? The not-terribly-famous-yet perpetrators of huge, deliberately coarse-grained works or installations that scream for attention in galleries of post-modern art and sometimes require you to read an accompanying statement of the artist's philosophy.
The little rant above reminded me of an artist who worked in a diagonally different tradition: Hiroshige. Do look him up.
angrysoba
Philosophile
New least favourite artist. The father of this...
Scopedog
Muse
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This thread is about paintings and that's a drawing. You're off topic. The art world will be glad when you're dead.
gabeygoat
Master Poster
I like Goya, Velasquez, and Francis Bacon off the top of my head.
angrysoba
Philosophile
Oh my God! You're not assuming I am the creator of that abomination are you?
Shankly
Scholar
I don't claim to have any expert knowledge of art, but I'd say my favourite artists are Turner and the Pre- Raphaelites.
Tricky
Briefly immortal
Yeah, I have a hard time appreciating cubism. But I will say that I appreciate the posts in this thread and will try to revisit some of the artists that are mentioned frequently. Plus I promise to learn how to spell van Gogh.
ddt
Mafia Penguin
[utter pedantry]Roger had it slightly wrong there. The "van" part of his name is called a "tussenvoegsel". It's capitalized whenever it's the first part of the name as written - not counting titles or honorifics. So it's
Vincent van Gogh
V. van Gogh
Van Gogh
mr. Vincent van Gogh
mr. Van Gogh
etcetera.
Tricky
Briefly immortal
I saw his "Helga" paintings when they toured Houston. They didn't do anything for me.
paiute
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I like art that is so bad it is memorable:
http://www.museumofbadart.org/
(Started out as a bunch of paintings hung in the long hallway leading to the basement restrooms at a decrepit community movie theater in Dedham MA)
I'm binary on art: when I see a painting I think either "Museum" or "Yard sale". Lots of painters I don't necessarily like personally and wouldn't hang a print of on my own wall I can tell are still "Museum", but Kincaid's works were instantly "Yard sale".
http://www.museumofbadart.org/
(Started out as a bunch of paintings hung in the long hallway leading to the basement restrooms at a decrepit community movie theater in Dedham MA)
I'm binary on art: when I see a painting I think either "Museum" or "Yard sale". Lots of painters I don't necessarily like personally and wouldn't hang a print of on my own wall I can tell are still "Museum", but Kincaid's works were instantly "Yard sale".
Scopedog
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Nope, I'm well aware of its origin.
I love how cubism "unsticks" painting from being from a single viewpoint. You have to think about the different ways you're seeing it, which is what makes it fun, makes it art. It goes beyond just another new brush technique or different subject.