Re: truth
JLNobody wrote:Portal Star, After reading your statement that in producing even the most representational painting one is making something very different from the actual object, I realize I must qualify my statement above that I do not feel artistically gratified by "copying" a natural scene. I do think that a really effective still life or landscape painter does not merely mimic his object; he is creating something new, perhaps the poetic feeling the object evokes in him. In other words representational art must always be a creation, never a copy. What is being actually represented is the artist's poetic feelings and aesthetic sensibilities not the objective image before him. When I draw people, I never use models. I've drawn enough models in the past to have a sense of how the body is organized, so now I just construct a figure or figures with the intent of dramatizing some aspect of human life. I do not care in the least if the figure is realistic, only if it works aesthetically and if it conveys my dramatic message.
I have seen "slavishly copied" work, but I think in many ways a painting can never be slavishly copied. A good painter choses what colors to put, what parts to emphasize, which to develop, what to leave in and out - regardless of the style they work in.
Even the most representational of pictures, for me, are not copied. For me they are still creations because of this process - even if you paint exactly what you see - it is going to be your translation of it. The way that you- see that specific shade of blue and put it down, the parts that interest you the artist more than others. So you have originality of framing - chosing what to include on your canvas - you have originality in your method of spacial and color depiction, and other things. It is not possible to paint every leaf or branch on a tree, every grain in a field, every constantly moving cloud in the sky. It would be impossible for a landscape painter to "slavishly copy" from nature because every step is a description of what they see - not what they see. A dot on the canvas is not the same as a leaf. The clouds and wind do not hold still for you. Carravagio's realism is drastically different from Raphael's, Sargent's, from Andrew Wyeth's, and from Veremeer's - but they are all depicting physical space with "representational" objects. With photographs and much of photo-realism, those problems have mostly already been solved and you are merely copying - the colors have already been translated into a pigment scale, the three dimensional objects have already become flat, the lighting and it's effects have been laid out for you.
In an abstract, you chose the color, you chose how you want to depict. But I think that even when you are doing abstract you are influenced by life. What we think and feel revolves around our biology and life experiences. No matter how abstract you get, you will never get away from having paintings in a physical world that are made and looked at with human senses (though Duchamp may try to get away from this.)
I don't think there is any kind of purism in art - to the point that we can get away from the physicality of our world, and I don't think you are automatically slavishly copying if you work in a literal representation mode - it is just one way to orient a painting.
[ oh, and before you take me too seriously - this doesn't mean all literal representations are good. Many of them are terrible. But they are not automatically bad. ]
