Many years ago bad days descended upon me. It seemed that my troubles would never end. I lived in a world of semi-detached unhappiness, interrupted time to time with bad news. It seemed like some people were doing really well, unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them. But one day I decided to borrow an art book and unexpectedly stepped into a different world.
The introduction on this book began as follows: “Shall I be accused of wishful thinking if I promise the reader that oil painting is not all that difficult?” It was for me an invitation to amble. Then the book says about the importance of developing a personal style because “in the last analysis, it is this which will mark out your paintings as different from the rest.” And it went on “And if I am in danger of over-emphasizing the importance of self-determination, it is because many beginner’s and adult amateurs miss the joy of painting through the very fear of forgetting the written word…
All of us like to draw the sky bright blue with puffs of white for clouds, but apparently, this is wrong. Even a clear blue sky devoid of any clouds cant be drawn in this way. The color is more positive blue at the top of the picture - the portion which we have to raise our eyes in nature - than it is directly above the horizon which is lighter. Though I’ve never kind of noticed it, it really is true, for when I followed this principle I found that my skies looked real for it “conveyed the dome-like nature of the sky.”
The book goes on about clouds “Isolated white clouds will soon be noticed to have a clearer (not sharper) definition at the top than underneath. The lightest portion is also at the top, while at the bottom they are softer and more indistinct in outline”. This seemed more difficult to understand but when I followed it my clouds had depth and seemed real rather than the white puffballs floating aimlessly in a blue sky.
How so many good ideas could be packed into such a small book was amazing. The drawings don’t tell you everything you need to know but are so “clever” that they make you want to draw. This book falls under the “How to Draw” and “How to Paint” kind of books but there are some equally interesting art books that seem to deal more with “Art History and Analysis.” When you read them you get the feeling that most of the modern artists mentioned were at the very least drunk or possibly completely insane and there were many of them forming “Art Movements.” And there are many intelligent people willing to buy their work for millions sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars. In “Twenty Marilyns” a 1962 work by Andy Warhol, the artist seems to have more or less printed the same image twenty times on a canvas, in what he called the “assembly line effect.” It is said to reflect critically upon the supposed uniqueness of the work of art in a world of mass reproduction and mass media. He has “sought to abolish both the craftsmanship and genius of the individual artist through embracing mechanical reproduction.
Then take minimalism. In this, the artist exerts minimal manual effort, like for example keeping a yellow fluorescent light in a large empty room. I kind of never understood this. If doing as little as possible seems to be the point why do anything at all? Then I finally got it...it is not the artwork itself but the clever idea behind it that gives it its value. It's incredible.
RJX
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