I've not been painting recently. I have a RSI. My wrist and hand aches. I'm resting it. It's given me time to think about art. I do what I have termed Compart. This is painting using the computer and the Painter program.
When I tell people the picture has been painted on a computer, their admiring smiling face suddenly changes with a jaw drop and eyes glazing and a sudden loss of interest. I try to rekindle the interest by explaining and some of it comes back, but usually with less interest.
Why is this I ask myself?
It is of course because they don't consider art by computer real art, nor photographs for that matter.
Real art is considered by many people to involve some hand craft, some skill, which computer art they think (in ignorance), doesn't have.
Computer art has as much skill as painting in oils, though some of the skills are different, but the main debate is really: does art need to have been made with craft skill in order to be art?
My argument is no, it doesn't.
What makes a picture art is two main things
1. The choice of subject. The choice is the result of the 'seeing eye'
Claude Monet:
"It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly."
Pablo Picasso:
"Art is the elimination of the unnecessary."
"I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else."
"There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun."
2. The way we compose the chosen subject on our 'canvas', and how we have changed it in the process.
4 comments:
For something to be considered as art it should have one of two properties; be pleasing to the eye or communcate an idea from artist to consumer.
The first part is relatively simple, pleasing to the eye is always in the eye of the beholder, "I know what I like". The second is more subtle, first the artist must identify something unseen, or little known, and then find a way of communicating that to the consumer. If done well, if offering great insight, then we have great art.
I don't think pleasing the eye is a property of art, though it may be of some art. Guernica shocks. Communication yes, but whether or not the viewer gets the message is up to the viewer. The artist hopes, but sometimes the message can be weighty and obscure.
"Art expresses nothing except itself" Oscar Wilde
"Art is embedded in nature and they who can extract it, have it." Albrecht Durer
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