a year and a half out of school and I can still get this annoyed
I think people who really enjoy cooking must find a zen in the process that I can't. Either I'm freaking out because at any second the food might catch on fire/explode/become otherwise inedible and then OMG I just wasted an hour of my life for nothing and am still hungry, or I'm bored because it takes forever to grate/chop/stir things. It's not I'm bad at it; as long as I have an explicit recipe to follow I've never had a true kitchen disaster (because I follow the recipe with obsessive paranoia). But I do not understand why it seems like the entire internet finds this activity fun ANYways, I was looking through one of my sketchbooks for a recipe when I rediscovered this quote that I'd copied down.
"In the end, art that does not engage an audience cannot communicate and, thus, cannot be expressive. The most rigorous intellect and intense emotions must still use a visual language that speaks to people if they are to be successfully understood or felt." -p20, Rifkins*
This was from the year I spent being furiously angry at the dean of painting at my school. The quote is in reference to Norman Rockwell, who the dean would tend to derisively compare artists to that he didn't like. He liked abstract conceptualism. You know, the kind that doesn't actually involve have to involve paint. One of the quotes I have from him is "Too much skill can deaden a piece." O RLY? I got through his department talks (I was minoring in painting that year, so ended up having to attend these) by writing down counter-arguments and planning this elaborate series of highly representational paintings of performance art. In the style of people like Caravaggio or Norman Rockwell. Yeah. This never happened, because I gave up and stopped taking painting classes first, and while I still like the idea I think I'm glad I didn't spend the last two years of college picking fights, and instead decided to stick to commercial art where I can draw monsters and be as accessibly narrative as I want.
This would be why I tend to refer to myself as an illustrator, not an artist. That, and one too many 'What is art?' discussions. They're never less than an hour long, and are incredibly painful because there's always at least one person who's insisting on a strict definition based on what is 'good' (if you're lucky someone would have at least thought to specify that you're talking about visual art, otherwise this is even worse), and at least one either playing devils advocate, or genuinely insisting that everything is art. They will both be very stubborn. The only possible end to this is that yes, art has a very vague definition, trying to narrow it down to a specific set of ideals is fruitless as those are very subjective and if you have the two people arguing they almost definitely have different opinions about that, but regardless of any aesthetic or intellectual merit a piece can be said to have, you're under no obligation to like it.
:deep breath:
Ok, enough of that.
*I think this is the book that's from.
"In the end, art that does not engage an audience cannot communicate and, thus, cannot be expressive. The most rigorous intellect and intense emotions must still use a visual language that speaks to people if they are to be successfully understood or felt." -p20, Rifkins*
This was from the year I spent being furiously angry at the dean of painting at my school. The quote is in reference to Norman Rockwell, who the dean would tend to derisively compare artists to that he didn't like. He liked abstract conceptualism. You know, the kind that doesn't actually involve have to involve paint. One of the quotes I have from him is "Too much skill can deaden a piece." O RLY? I got through his department talks (I was minoring in painting that year, so ended up having to attend these) by writing down counter-arguments and planning this elaborate series of highly representational paintings of performance art. In the style of people like Caravaggio or Norman Rockwell. Yeah. This never happened, because I gave up and stopped taking painting classes first, and while I still like the idea I think I'm glad I didn't spend the last two years of college picking fights, and instead decided to stick to commercial art where I can draw monsters and be as accessibly narrative as I want.
This would be why I tend to refer to myself as an illustrator, not an artist. That, and one too many 'What is art?' discussions. They're never less than an hour long, and are incredibly painful because there's always at least one person who's insisting on a strict definition based on what is 'good' (if you're lucky someone would have at least thought to specify that you're talking about visual art, otherwise this is even worse), and at least one either playing devils advocate, or genuinely insisting that everything is art. They will both be very stubborn. The only possible end to this is that yes, art has a very vague definition, trying to narrow it down to a specific set of ideals is fruitless as those are very subjective and if you have the two people arguing they almost definitely have different opinions about that, but regardless of any aesthetic or intellectual merit a piece can be said to have, you're under no obligation to like it.
:deep breath:
Ok, enough of that.
*I think this is the book that's from.