The Big Painting Challenge

Jenny's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jenmo/ Abstract isn't my thing but, in as much as I'm qualified to judge, her stuff is nice. I can't offer any greater insights than that. And given the vagueness of the term 'art' she's no more or less an artist than the rest of us. So if she's a teacher of 'abstract' art then that is surely fine. Perhaps she's brilliant at it. If she's teaching drawing skills to school kids then heaven help them. But I suspect she isn't.

Abstract art? I'm confessing to being somewhat baffled by the term. As I understood it, it was using shapes and objects to convey an image instead of conventional norm of trees, water, bushes, dogs, people ec etc. It seems now though that it's okay to throw a puddle of mixed colours on a canvas, twirl it around, have a paddy with a paintbrush, throw you shorn tresses from the hairdressers in, then sit back for a fortnight inhaling scented candles till it reminds you vaguely of your auntie Maud's aspidistra and a happy time when Famous Five were your universe, but in a deeply psychological and intenself spiritual way. ...or something until you think of a suitable arty title... After studying abstract art in its form of being painted by masters, ( and I'm no expert on any of them, which are mostly cubism anyway ) Picassos's "Femme Assise", Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger (La femme au cheval is absolutely brilliant) , this is why much of what passes as abstract is actually ...er, vague. I might have a go at this stuff. Sorry for the mini rant, but there are more charlatans in art than in the football agents club.....and that's saying something. 😆

I've got some spare knitting needles you can have Syd. Linda Wilson

I said in a previous post that I wasn’t going watch any more of TBPC (probably) and I succeeded. Has it finished? I don’t care who wins/won. It is what it is; a TV programme and the format demands winners and losers. I fail to comprehend why anyone would want to enter for it. However, coming across this post again I feel that there are some very severe and narrow opinions based upon very little hard information. In an earlier programme that I did see JM said something like “…I always use hair in my painting…” which at the time I thought can’t possibly be true and looking at the Instagram link above, it isn’t. It seemed to me, in what I did see, that observational drawing was probably not her best skill but that she was able to pull some sort of observed qualities from the subject but that these were almost lost in her preoccupation with the decorative—and the hair. Again, the Instagram stuff tends to support this I think. Her preoccupation with the decorative is why she won the public vote twice (up to when I stopped watching). Abstract art in my laptop dictionary is defined as art that does not attempt to represent external, recognizable reality but seeks to achieve its effect using shapes, forms, colors, and textures. (But as you can see from the spelling of recognisable and colour, it’s American so…) It’s also very inadequate I think. The accompanying thesaurus includes, for abstract, the words conceptual, intellectual, hypothetical, speculative. Abstract art is definitely not about replacing a tree with a circle on a stick (although before someone jumps in there, I’m sure that has been done). Mark Rothko for example was a colour field painter, interested only in the qualities of colour—no ‘objects’ at all, just colour. Whether this work is worth the money that is paid for it is an entirely different—and I’d say, irrelevant—question. That’s the art market which is not art. Study the painting not the price tag. I suspect that JM would work very well teaching school kids because they would like her and develop an interest in and feeling for art that would provide a basis for a sound development in later years. Especially after being on TBPC; the kids would love that. Whether she is a good teacher in Offsted terms I couldn’t possibly say, and it’s not an imprisonable offence to not put BA, MA, PhD etc. after your name. Some choose not to do it because they think it pretentious and pompous. Sylvia—what do you find ambiguous about that? A serious question. It seems to me that it’s a more direct artist’s statement than …my work attempts to confront the dichotomy between… or similar. Surely there is no “…recognised sense of the art of abstract.…” although there are certainly many opinions on that. By it’s very nature abstract art is continually confronting its own definition—Damien Hirst’s shark &co. could be seen as no more than a development of Duchamp’s Fountain. Art is about looking at and studying the world we live in and also about what we see, the way we see it and the eye we see it with.

Ah but - you're right and I agree Syd - but people are drawn to fame? and letters after a name.