Well. It seems we have had a few quiet days here on A&P, so I thought I’d fill in the silence with a little thunder.
If you could see my face, you’d smile.
First, please enjoy this image of Rembrandt’s portrait of Jan Six. At this level of greatness, one must say, as did mmm, DeKooning? Stella? “He is on one mountain; I am on another.”
So I will not say “The greatest portrait in history,” but certainly an Everest. Sorry about the bad scan. It seems that all the better images on the net had that same irritating line about two-thirds of the way from the left.
A recent comment asked whether any artist today could paint like Rembrandt, Titian, or Raphael.
My answer was that there were many.
But I’d like to add to that. There are not as many as there could be, or should be.
I did not say that I could paint like any of those guys, but I almost did.
Because I can.
But the thought of chorus singing whether politely or impolitely “Prove it, you big mouthed, bragging, arrogant asshole” made me feel a bit ill, so I remained silent.
Also, I knew what would happen next. After I did prove that I could, in fact, paint like Rembrandt, et. al., the next thing would be, “Oh. Well. That’s all well and good and very impressive etc., but can you do anything original?”
So it was rather a no win situation and one of the reasons we artists tend not to emulate previous artists and one of the reasons we artists get so tired of trying to cater to the whims of our clients or the art community and one of the reasons we finally, in the end, learn to ignore all criticism.
Yet after perusing I don’t know how many hundreds of art instruction books, and after gazing at the works of I don’t know how many thousands of pieces by art instructors, I cannot get over the effrontery of all these teachers who cannot paint well at all yet purport to teach.
I know that’s a terribly snotty thing to say, but anything less is just untrue.
This is, as I see it, the single most horrid situation in the art world today. It seems that the skills of our predecessors have been largely lost.
Where I find decent instruction still existing is in private studios here and there. It exists, but it’s just not the common or normal thing.
So I’ve decided to write an art instruction book.
In my last post I quoted Aristotle saying, “Where your skills and the needs of the world meet lies your destiny.”
I can duplicate the techniques of the past with ease. And when I’m in a good mood, I’m a pretty good explainer. It’s not that I’m a better artist. I’m not. Believe me, I have no delusions there.
One particularly insightful book I used to have was written by Harold Speed, a Brit, around the turn of the century. (I lost this book somewhere in some move.) My edition was titled The Art and Science of Drawing, published by Dover. That was not the original title. As I recall, his was better. Mr. Speed makes some occasional sharp comments like, “You can’t stop the ones who have it, and you can’t help the ones who don’t.”
He goes on, however, to suggest that the true artistic spirit needs not much in the way of inspiration; rather, he or she needs solid tools to use to create, and those tools are good solid techniques.
Possibly the reason art instruction is generally so bad is because many schools just try and fill classes without regard to the student’s actual potentials. This is not so in other fields, like engineering or the sciences. If you can’t do advanced math, you’re out.
Well, the techniques of art are often very tough an require a fantastic amount of practice. It takes a lot of patience and discipline to master them.
Like responsibility, another hard sell, that.
But I need make no apology to anyone for demanding excellence.
Setting aside my own artistic ideals, I’ll be taking certain key artists from history, like Monet, Sargent, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Leonardo, and showing, with step by step instructions, how to paint just like that.
Titian doesn’t make my list though. Rather crude, I think, along with the “sack of potato” muscularity of the late Michelangelo, but a Botticelli angel? Yes. Yes. A good chance to demonstrate pure egg tempera too.
And Caravaggio, even though he himself said he derived his technique from the “dark style” of Leonardo nevertheless achieved a speed and dash that old Leo never did. Plus his manner of drawing with paint with no under drawing has got to demonstrated.
Such a work could be useful to other artists who like me never really needed any imaginative stimuli like “how to be creative” but rather needed more practical advice about plain, old fashioned technique.
Here for your reading pleasure, is a clipped version of one of my favorite songs, “Working Class Hero,” By the inimitable John Lennon.
I rather like the idea of this in the frontispiece.
As soon as you’re born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at allThey hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rulesWhen they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can’t really function you’re so full of fearKeep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can seeThere’s room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hillA working class hero is something to be
I am open to suggestions as to the artists to include. To give you the paradigm I follow, I want the artists who were studied by other artists across generational spans and thus had big down the stream of time effects.
Rex,
Please reconsider Titian: he could paint Skin!
I also recommend (at least for enjoyment) looking at a painting I recently saw at the Met. You go up the Grand Staircase and directly ahead into the first Gallery. Go Left as far as possible and then turn right into the next Gallery. The first painting on your right: touching, amusing, fierce, beautiful, historical (Medieval), colorful, attentive, narrative, a varied cast of characters, earthy, wacky, etc.
I appreciate the full measure of my deficiencies.
Rex,
Lofty aim here. I would be very interested to see how this progresses along with your responsibilities of being a Executive Chef at the resort. That said, I think a lot like you – technique is very important – unfortunately they do not stress it like they do in engineering school or any other vocational school (like you have rightly pointed out)…, but art with technique takes patience and time and that is something that we all have in very limited supply in this age of short attention spans – hence artists turn to churning out pastiche’s of colors randomly selected from the color wheel and try to retrofit and dovetail to existing conditions and tailor their artist statements accordingly…
Anyways, I am glad you are embarking on this endeavor. The one artist that I would urge you to look at (if you have not done so already) is Vincent van Gogh.
Hi D.,
Problem is, I haven’t seen but one Titian; he’s just not well represented in California, so I think a trip at least to New York would be in order. I assume that’s which of the Mets you meant.
And thanks for the tip on a picture to see there.
But for Skin, well, Rubens, though the arrangement of his subjects and voluptuous form style don’t thrill me, could really, really nail texture, like skin.
Some consider him the greatest technician ever.
Hey Sunil,
Actually, I’m not sure I could do Van Gogh with any sincerity. He had a way of seeing that eludes me. Just duplicating the technique without getting into the right mind would not come off well.
I’m thinking now of Sgt. Peppers where the Beatles decided to pretend to be a different band. It’s something like that.
But I’d do Van Gogh if I could. And certainly I will try.
Also, I expect to have more free time once I’m staffed up and have trained all the new guys (or gals, if we are lucky). We have a new menu. Once the staff get it down, things’ll smooth out.
As to whether it’s possible to spend the time learning, well, it’s a lifelong thing. Never stop, I say.
Cezanne?
Heh. Hi June,
Cezanne and I have issues, but Braque?
Rex,
Did you spend time learning to copy paintings, or are you like those people who can play a tune after hearing it once? By the way, how is the market for Rembrandt-style paintings?
Is Vermeer on your list?
Steve,
I actually have sort of almost a day off, so I’m more vocal than usual.
Vermeer! Yee hah! How could I have not put him down right at the first blush?
Long ago, I came across a statement by Leonardo that the way to learn a master was to first study his masters. Applying that led me to a treatise by Alberti on perspective that to this day I think is the best ever written. At the beginnings of new forms, there is this gorgeous simplicity. Learn that, and the later forms seem to come.
If you study the blues from the twenties and thirties, combine that with the ancient lyricism of the British Isles, and master the accented syncopation of African beats you know the whole essence of rock music.
As I expect you know, it was a great part of the academic tradition to copy master paintings. Since the painters I most adored said they did that to great benefit, I followed suit.
What I have not done, and what excites me about this project, is to use exact versions of old techniques for modern subjects.
Rembrandt, for example, loved to go for walks and draw the people and places of his town. Imagine Rembrandt doing a painting of a crusty old automobile mechanic. Thrilling, huh?
But as to the market, I cannot say. I do know that there will always be a lot of people staring at any Rembrandt in any museum. He pulls. No doubt about it.
And the market for Monets is limitless. It’s that sense of happy serenity he emanates. There’s a hum that blows right out of the paint. People really get fueled by it.