Art & Perception

I would like to hear what this group of artists believe makes good landscapes. Is there a feeling or something that words can explain, or not.  Should people be placed in landscape images? Is their presence necessary to make better art than without them?

In the last ongoing post, David mentioned “The main thing that stands out to me is the absence of people”, this hit me as being very profound.  I immediately ran to look at my work, and sure enough, I had nearly totally failed to put people in any of my landscapes; when I did, it was unconscious.  The only time I paint people is when I paint people. This is odd to me now, (what have I been thinking?), it seems so obvious to want to include something as familiar as people in a work to make it more inviting to the viewer, they could perhaps bring attention to something being performed. At what point however, would a “landscape” painting become a “genre” painting? Does it matter? I would like to know what quality you may feel is most important and should be included in most landscapes.

Cheers 

I’ve been working on a project.  I’d like folks to look at it and give me feedback.  Apropos of my comment about critiques of single works that need to be seen in a larger context, you have a chance to look at just shy of 90 photos. 

Before you look, some information that may be helpful.  The project is open ended – rather than having a definite goal in mind, it’s loosely organized around several goals.  I’m happy to discuss the goals, but I’d like to get some feedback from you all first.  There’s no significance to the format on my web site other than it’s convenient for me, the pages download in a reasonable time, etc.  Likewise, the order of the images isn’t meaningful to the project; they’re just presented in rough chronological order. 

So I’m interested in having people look at this bolus of photography, and tell me what they think.  Comments on individual photos, comments on the overall collection, comments on the overall direction of the project, or changes in direction you see as you browse through – those are of great interest to me.  Comments like “You should use this cool slideshow flash applet to present the images” are of less interest to me, primarily because the web is a view of the project seen through a glass, darkly.  The real project is a set of prints, 15″ x 20″ image area, intended to be overmatted out to 22″x28″ and then framed. 

One of the things that’s really helpful to me is seeing your questions – any questions. The title of the project, ‘sdg’, is significant but not something I’m prepared to discuss just yet.  Other than that, though, anything is fair game, ranging from technique and technical process all the way through to motivation, goals, whether I’m trying to communicate or not, the technical or artistic quality.

What I’m really hoping for, here, is more than just making this post and getting some comments and having it end with this post; I’d really like to start a conversation with several of you that goes on and on and helps guide the project as it evolves.

The web page of the project is at http://www.butzi.net/galleries/sdg/sdg.htm.

I’ve never needed an artist’s statement professionally. Probably I never will – I have no ambition to do the sorts of things that require them. However, if I did need one, I know I would have great difficulty in getting away with my working statement: This is what I saw. Even if I stretch that out into longhand – these photographs are representations, to the best of my ability, of what I saw – I only get to fourteen words.

I’ve updated my photo home page.

I’m writing about this again now, because I was recently asked by Lisa Call to explain what I meant when I said “art isn’t about communication. I am trying to communicate nothing. This is just what I saw.” Specifically she said “Colin could you expand on these comments? It is what you saw – but you put it here for us to see and to react to. Isn’t that a form of communication?”.

Now, I’ve had enough debates about the communication thing to know that, er, some of you disagree with me (one part of the debate is archived here, and I wrote an article which is here). I’ve no particular desire to go over that ground again, because it seemed to me that it was a matter of belief, and beliefs are not challenged by arguments. What I want to try to do here is to answer Lisa’s question in practical terms.

It is a fair question. If I’m not communicating when I put one of my pictures on display, then what am I doing?

I need to invoke a level one cut-off. I am saying here is a photograph. I think that that is about as uninteresting as communication can get, and even if I didn’t say it, the photograph would sort of say it for me. Please ignore this level.

What am I doing?

My photo home page has contained the following statement for some time: “I’m showing them to help create a dialogue, and with the hope that they may raise a smile, create an understanding or just generally do some good, some how, some where.” There are two parts to this, which I’ll deal with in reverse order:

a) smiles, understandings, and good: this is the altruism motive. I go to places like this every day for enjoyment. You post. I post. We both smile. I don’t think that this needs further explanation.

b) creating a dialogue: this is the potentially confusing area. I want to hear what you think about my photos. Not whether you think that they are sharp enough or whether the sky is blue enough – there is a place for that, but web reproductions aren’t usually worth the effort. No, I want to hear about what they make you think. I do this for purely selfish reasons, because some of you, some times, think something that adds to my thoughts and allows me to see better in the future. This is actually at its most interesting when your reaction is very different from mine. When there is no obvious flow between me seeing and creating, and you reacting. You have my attention the most when you have seen something that I didn’t.

If Winogrand is right and photos are new facts then they are interesting special cases to practise seeing on. If I can’t see what you can see in the photograph then I have to ask myself why? And is it interesting? It is much more difficult to have the same conversation about the real world. It is too big and we might not be looking at the same thing. Observation changes reality’s cat. Time creates difficulty. Things change whilst they are being described. On the other hand, photos are dimensionally limited. They don’t react to being observed. They do not change signficantly during a viewing period. And my photos are something that I think that I’ve looked at. That I think that I understand. Show me a new way of looking at them and boy, am I interested. I’m learning.

There are a couple of subsidiary things going on. I’m one of those human being thingies, so like everybody else I get high on random praise. Getting a few ‘the best photo ever’ comments never did anybody any harm.

I also use my photos as gateways to communication. Here I am on Photostream and Art & Perception (dual posting) talking about stuff – both through the comments and by email – with dozens of people that I’ve never met (it is sometimes slightly spooky that the conversations are overheard by quite so many thousands of you, which is why my email address is so freely available). The communication is about art. Not the other way around.

I recently volunteered some advise on how to solve a painting problem to one of our fellow bloggers. Before hitting that submit button I re-read what I had written and in that crazy way we have of talking to ourselves, I said why don’t you follow your own advise.

This is a study I started as a result. I am trying to let the different colors create the form in the faces, eventually losing most if not all of the drawing lines. The other issue I am looking to work out is the merging of the two heads

Sorry for not posting earlier (I’m a very late riser), and thank you Lisa for your impromptu post. I know that some of you readers also follow my own blog, The Thinking Eye; for those who don’t, I’d like to briefly introduce myself. I’ll do so by following up belatedly on Karl’s Monday post, trying to get at some of my writerly goals and biases by way of my location. Since I also spend time on the Internet (a sort of place, perhaps), this makes a good companion piece to my recent off-site post on Art & Perception. From September of last year, my home has been Ithaca in Upstate New York.

Although I like to discuss Ithaca on my Eye and elsewhere, it often seems absurd of me to do so. A city of something like 50,000 people (the population varies with the coming and going of students), it is not, and has never been, an important art center on the order of Haarlem or New Amsterdam (although it was of some significance in the early film industry). Most likely, it will never be one in the future. Ambitious artists around here tend to gravitate towards NYC, which is about a six hour drive away. I like to travel there myself, as much as I can. Still, Ithaca is where I live, and it effects the way I think and experience art. (I live here by choice, so I try not to sound like I’m complaining too much.)

As a college town–home to Cornell University and Ithaca College–the place is hardly bereft of culture. In fact, it is something of a miniature melting pot, a mixture of different nationalities, religions (a major center of Tibetan Buhddism), and art-forms (music being much stronger than the visual arts). Unfortunately, most of the culture that I value most is not native-grown, but imported. Cornell’s Johnson Museum has a fine a fine permanent collection of art, with particular strengths in in Asian and American art. In addition, the museum and other branches of the school brings in a wide variety of exhibitions, artists and scholars. I try to take in as much of this as I can, digesting interesting bits through my writing. The problem is that most things of interest art-wise come from elsewhere, and are funneled from the top down. This presents problems for me both as a (lapsed) artist and as someone interested in writing seriously about art. I’m working on the latter, at least.
I moved here from Boston last year (mostly for personal reasons) after completing several years of undergraduate study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. My final year there was spent at Tufts University (which is associated with the SMFA), studying things other than studio art. Because of this time period, and because I felt (correctly or not) that I had used up a surge of ideas beginning in 2001, I have shifted my attention from making art to writing about it. While many artists seem to regard this as a waste of time, I believe that it is valuable. If nothing else, I am good at it.
Karl’s claims that “the action in the great living art centers of today is not all that impressive”, citing New York, Berlin, and London. I would like to politely disagree. I have never been to Berlin or London, but I have been to NYC, Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C. and Paris, among other places. While I’ve seen plenty of bad art, I’ve also seen a great many things of interest (to me, Karl’s tastes are clearly very different). My main interest is not in the art of the past, the kind enshrined in museums. My main interest is in the living arts of today: not because I think we’re living in the greatest of eras, but simply because the culture is active. I enjoy being in the midst of this culture.

Eventually, I plan to move to New York; in the meantime, where I am is alright.

This is a 450 pixel version. To see a 650px version or a 950px version, click on the links.

Web reproductions. Don’t you love them. The original is pigment on paper. The paper is a mild gloss and is faintly off white. This gives the lightest of warm tones to the print, which I haven’t tried to reproduce here. My preferred size for this image is about 12 inches (30cm) on 19 inch paper.

Haarlem is a major art center — in historical terms. When the genres of landscape and still life were revolutionary and new (in the 17th century), Haarlem artists were the key players. The Haarlem portrait painter Frans Hals is one of the most influential artists in history. Much of what is best about Manet‘s work he borrowed directly from Frans Hals. Van Gogh was hugely influenced by Frans Hals as well.

Haarlem also has one of the greatest Michelangelo drawing collections in the world. But this is a dead collection, in a sense: in a recent major exhibition in Haarlem, artists were not permitted to study Michelangelo’s work in the only way that makes sense, drawing within the exhibition itself, looking directly at the master’s work. Although there was a huge volume of visitors to the show, there was almost no serious critical analysis of the art or the exhibition (here are exceptions: 1, 2).

Thus, Haarlem is a cultural graveyard. Haarlem’s living inhabitants treat the past with silent, uncritical reverence. The tombstones of the old masters (native and foreign), cast a long shadow over contemporary artwork and creativity.

Artists in Haarlem today can be divided into two broad categories:

• those trying continue past traditions (especially in still life painting)
• those trying to be part of the great international art scene.

In the first category are some talented painters achieving commercial success with their neo-17th century still life paintings. But in this endeavor, they are little more than expert craftsmen. [Hanneke van Oosterhout is flirting with the idea becoming one of these, but I think she will pull out before it is too late].

In the second category are artists who are in denial about their place of residence. These artists would probably be better off if they moved to the real international art centers of today — New York, London, Berlin. How can one be a great international artist living in Haarlem, of all places?

Before we all pack up and move to New York, I’d like to point out that the action in the great living art centers of today is not all that impressive. I’ve spent a lot of time in New York and Berlin, with an eye to moving there for the sake of my art career. I was singularly unimpressed by what I saw in the living art culture. I might move to New York for its great museums, but not for its contemporary galleries.

More interesting to me than moving is to look at this cultural graveyard I live in, and see what are the weeds growing besides the tombstones. What is the new life here? Might it grow into something for the city to be proud of?

Where do you live and work? Could your city or town become an important art center? Or would you rather move to New York?

. . .

In a future post, I will profile what I consider to be the most exciting contemporary Haarlem artwork.