Is anyone there?

I realise I might be on unstable ground here but a scan of the works in the gallery at any time and many of the forum threads too, more especially those that discuss members’ own work, reveals the following— There is on PoL a strong preference for and bias towards work that is representational in the photographic sense of that word. I do not want, here, to regurgitate the painting from photographs debate that has been aired many times. My thesis, such as it is, is just that whatever the subject matter—landscape, portrait, whatever—the preference and the occupation of members is to portray that frozen moment, as captured by the camera. There is nothing ‘wrong’ with this but I confess I do find its prevalence here frustrating, I think (and the uncertainty suggested there is intentional), my frustration comes from the notion that this limits discussion to discussion of technique and materials; to the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’. Now you may well say that it’s just a matter of opinion and preference and of course you’d be right so this is, in some way perhaps, a call for like-minded painters because it does feel quite lonely sometimes. Imagine an exhibition of landscapes and portraits from the full span of human achievement. In the landscape room I would spend ten times longer looking at the Tress painting than I would the Kruseman— In the portraits, the Ken Paine would get more time than the Cuyp— Now, I confess I’ve picked the contemporary examples with more thought than I gave to the ‘classical’ examples; they are both artists whose work I admire and have seen in the flesh. But my point is that I find the energy and the delight in the use of the medium far more exciting. I find the lack of pretence that the thing is anything more than marks on a surface made by human hand to be far more imaginative. And in the case of landscapes, I find the contemporary works of this artist and other contemporary artists to be so much closer to how I experience being in the landscape. My eye does not freeze the movement of the trees in the wind, I do not gaze with a fixed, middle-distance stare. I can’t see everything in sharp focus at the same time. There are so many I don’t-s and I can’t-s associated with the realist approach that it evokes in me almost nothing, other than the appreciation and acknowledgement of technique of course. At the same exhibition where I saw the Ken Paine portrait, was a large drawing of a teasel executed with immaculate precision and technique. My point I suppose is that all it seems to be saying is look what I can do. I’ve picked the subject-matter of my examples because landscapes is what I do, what excites me, and portraits was just the first major alternative subject that came to mind probably because there are always a lot of portraits in the gallery, but I feel the same way with respect to any other subject matter. And I’m quite deliberately steering clear of abstract art, as that, clearly is looking to do something else entirely that is not really relevant to my ‘thesis’.