Art & Perception

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Painting From Life vs. From Photos

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The is art school worthless? question brought in some amazing comments. Here are two that make it even harder for me to make up my mind on the issue:

Art dealer Dan Fox said “nearly every fine artist of any repute either went to art school or studied with a master for years, or both.”

Artist Rex Crockett replied, “I know a lot of artists who make good livings at art. About half of them went to art school, and half of those, like me, dropped out in disgust. (I lasted one day.)”

Now, how do we reconcile these views?

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When I am feeling adventurous, I cross-post my blog entries on the unmoderated news group rec.arts.fine. If a blog is cosy like a living room (to paraphrase Arthur), rec.arts.fine is like a New York city street at night. You never know who might attack you, but they are bound to be someone interesting. [I add emphasis to quotes below]

Dan Fox asked if I went to art school, and when I replied in the negative, he wrote:

The foundation courses you get in art school, drawing in particular, are crucial to becoming a competent artist. This means regular classes, lots of drawing, lots of teaching, over a period of time. Learning to draw is like learning to play the piano. Books and workshops contribute very little.This is the reason nearly every fine artist of any repute either went to art school or studied with a master for years, or both. The exception is the genius like Francis Bacon, but these people are rare.

Before I could reply, Rex Crockett dropped this bombshell:

Nonsense. What is rare are people who are willing to repudiate a failed education.Good repute? With whom? Galleries, museums, the press, and the buying public do not care at all, not at all, whether you have a degree in art. It simply does not matter. It never did. It never will. I know a lot of artists who make good livings at art. About half of them went to art school, and half of those, like me, dropped out in disgust. (I lasted one day.) This idea that “It is really hard to survive as an artist” is one of the biggest lies ever told. The reason it is so hard for so many is because their work is crap.

Rex doesn’t have much sympathy for artists who don’t sell, does he?

I think that Dan Fox is making a strong statement without providing any evidence. Rex brings in the weight of personal experience, but I think he misses a key point: some artists find it difficult to make money because they continually push themselves to do things that are extremely challenging. It doesn’t mean their work is crap, but it might mean they are not being practical.

There is more to this debate to be read on the complete rec.arts.fine thread.

Thanks to Courtney, Bob, Tracy, David, and Angela for your insightful comments on the original post at my [our] blog.

One lack of comment I found interesting is that no one disputed my statement: “In art, professors and students do not generally collaborate in the process of creation and discovery in the same meaningful sense as they do in science.”

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Painting From Life vs. From Photos

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If you want to be a scientist, you really should study at a university and get a Ph.D. If you want to be a doctor, you should go to medical school. But if you want to be an artist, will art school help you? Only about half of the successful artists I know went to art school; furthermore, of those who did go to art school, their formal education seems only incidental to their success. What do you think? Is art school a good investment?

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In the Renaissance, an artist apprentice received training from a master by working on the master’s projects. In the most important art how-to book of all time, Cennino Cennini wrote “submit yourself to the direction of a master for instruction as early as you can; and do not leave the master until you have to.” The master had a strong incentive to teach, because good assistants were essential for fulfilling a major commission. Teaching was thus not separate from the master’s own creative work. Instead, it was critical to the productive success of the studio. The result was that apprentice and master collaborated in the process of artistic discovery.

A related method is used for teaching at the highest levels of education today. For example, a graduate student in biology will do research in a specific laboratory, under guidance of a recognized scientist. Only a small part of the student’s education comes through classroom teaching. The scientist has a strong incentive to teach the craft of working in the laboratory to a select group of students, because a group effort is necessary for major research projects. When scientists complain about the burdens of teaching, they are referring to teaching in the classroom. Good scientists know that teaching in the laboratory is essential to success in research. Graduate students thus learn to be scientists in the laboratory, collaborating in the process of discovery.

Art education today is a different story. Artists get paid to do “classroom” teaching at art school. But teaching in this mode does not contribute directly to the artist’s own work. Instead, it becomes an impediment. In art, professors and students do not generally collaborate in the process of creation and discovery in the same meaningful sense as they do in science. The reason probably has to do with our modern notions of artist: the artist (and therefore, the art professor) is supposed to be a loner in the process of creation. Scientists are not burdened with this notion, any more than were artists of the past (which is to say, of course the issue of credit is important, but it is not debilitating to the field).

I did not go to art school, but I had a valuable art education in my high school with one of the most remarkable art teachers in America — Walter Bartman. In his classroom, and on frequent painting excursions, there was an exhilarating sense of collaborating in a process of discovery. An interview with “Mr. Bartman” will appear soon [is here] on Art & Perception.

Drawing or painting from photographs is inherently different from working from life, because when working from a photograph, the subject of the work is a static image. Studying images has always played an important role in art, although the images in the past were of course not photographs, but works by other artists. As Cennino Cennini recommended in the 14th century:

take pains and pleasure in constantly copying the best things which you can find done by the hand of great masters. And if you are in a place where many good masters have been, so much the better for you. But I give you this advice: take care to select the best one every time, and the one who has the greatest reputation. And, as you go on from day to day, it will be against nature if you do not get some grasp of his style and of his spirit.

The style and spirit of the artist to be copied is as important as the subject of the artwork itself. Cennino emphasizes this point by directing the student to study one master at a time:

For if you undertake to copy after one master today and after another one tomorrow, you will not acquire the style of one or the other, and you will inevitably, through enthusiasm, become capricious, because each style will be distracting your mind. You will try to work in this man’s way today, and in the other’s tomorrow, and so you will not get either of them right.

This idea of copying another artist’s work to study style is perhaps alien to our contemporary ideas of how an artist should develop. But the goal, development of a personal style, is something that all artists share:

If you follow the course of one man through constant practice, your intelligence would have to be crude indeed for you not to get some nourishment from it. Then you will find, if nature has granted your any imagination at all, that you will eventually acquire a style individual to yourself, and it cannot help being good; because your hand and your mind, being always accustomed to gather flowers, would ill know how to pluck thorns.

How can we relate this approach of copying other artists to the practice of working from photographs? Dan Bodner said recently, “We cannot separate how we see from the way photography has informed our vision.” This seems consistent with Cennino’s writing. An artist who works continually from the photograph will, intentionally or not, acquire the “style and spirit” of the photograph. The camera thus becomes the artist’s master. Dan Bodner seems to have escaped this because he already developed a personal style before turning to photography as a source.