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Painting Challenge, BBC, again.... Episode 2
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Posted
Anyone who lives near the sea knows that the prevailing wind is from the sea during the day time. I guess the organisers are from the home counties. That is why they put the shelter on the land side and not where any sensible person would put it, on the seaward side. It would have been very easy to just turn it around and get everyone to paint the buildings instead of the pier. Perspective is just as relevant to buildings as it is to the pier.
Posted
Slap on the wrists of all of us yesterday when The Artist magazine landed here. Our esteemed editor Sally devoted a whole leader page on the philosophy behind the programme. She obviously read this web page. I would have thought with her behind the scenes access, she may explain why mentors were necessary.
Posted
Sally has written an interesting piece on her leader page (as Derek has pointed out), and explains in some detail the selection procedure and criteria involved with the programme. This procedure is quite different from say a selection committee assembled to choose work for a competition and of course that selection has to be made with TV entertainment in mind.
It has placed the programme in a different light and perhaps I was too hasty to judge the contestants, I suppose I had expected a similar standard to Landscape Artist of the Year but they are clearly two programmes with different criteria, thank you Sally for your interesting and informative page.
Also worth a mention in the latest edition of The Artist is a useful guide to entering painting competitions and written by Lachlan Goudie. A fair few tips to help guide you through the process if like myself you enjoy entering competitions and with that in mind the deadline for this years Open Art Competition at Patchings is 31 March so get your skates on. I will be busy next month working on some new ideas to enter, last year I won an award and received £250 worth of Caran D'Ache stuff which was tremendous.
Posted
Just imagine, Sylvia, doing all that from the Isle of Wight - not that I imagine it's much easier from where you are. Perhaps fortunately, I don't enjoy competitions at all, and very rarely enter them. There's really little or nothing to be done about it - these things are where they are, and if I really wanted to be in the swim, artistically or in any other respect, I'd have left the island long ago. I do sometimes wish, however, that there were more online, digital competitions - even though I'd probably give most of those a miss too. Competition is the breath of life for some people, but I'll settle for an innate sense of superiority suffused with megalomania. It's stood me in good stead for many years now.....
Posted
after reading these interesting comments I have watched the second one ,And I am so confused about art and what art is all about ,
I did not enjoy it ,but I will watch it again ..and I don't know why.
it needs artist,s to liven it up .someone not bad ,
\to me their was a lot of wrong perspective flying about
,,
Posted
It's an enjoyable talking point without needing to mean much other than a T.V show, if for a somewhat limited audience compared to important things like " I'm a celebrity and the world should know it", and "Big fat frocks you can't live without ladies" etc, etc. I'm always glad to see art getting any recognition. As a complete aside, I had another visit to our local art gallery (if it's worth calling that anymore because it's about one tenth of the size it used to be) yesterday, and another look at some nice ink drawings and prints by Tom Moran and his wife.
Posted
Agreeing with what you say Marjorie, but still a bit baffled as to whether this is a painting challenge or an art school class? I thought these contestants were to be given a challenge and then submit their ideas of the result. Surely that's what a challenge is about? How many artists, even those of international skills would paint something all the same way or care how someone else other than themselves see it? I don't wish to appear crass or hard-hearted, but what have either confident or frail personalities actually got to do with painting something in a judged challenge. If it's nothing more than " here's how you paint a flamingo/elephant etc lesson, then as a national challenge it's a bit of a joke. Yes, I enjoy the programme from the contestants angle and efforts, but the admin, mentors and judges are baffling the xxxx out of me. What really is it all about and do the many and varied types of application: detailed, impressionists, architectural, even abstract works not count?
Jim.
Posted
Painters who can't manage to paint elephants, almost irrespective of the time they've been given, really aren't worth considering as any kind of artists.
This programme was the end of the line so far as I'm concerned. Utter incapacity on any level, technical or otherwise - I don't know what this exercise was supposed to have achieved, but whatever it was it didn't achieve it. The failure to meet even the most basic level of competence was complete. There were bright spots - the painter who has been struggling throughout but still managed to win the popular vote over two programmes shone out among the dross this time, but for goodness' sake there is almost no one on this site who couldn't have done better than any of them. Perhaps that shouldn't surprise me....
As for the flamingos - OK, flamingos move about; they aren't easy to paint; they do have small eyes, so if your approach to painting animals depends on getting their eyes right (and not much else) you're in trouble. But for goodness' sake - that's no excuse for painting them as pink turkeys, is it? They can't draw! (Not the flamingos - you don't expect flamingos to be dab hands with the charcoal, but the painters - they just can't draw! How, HOW?, can you gaze for an hour or more at an elephant's bum and not be able to paint more than a beige lump with legs, failing even to get the ear even approximately right?)
I'm wasting no more time on watching this complete and catastrophic junk, and if these poor devils were selected from other painters, and the dross was discarded - how unutterably inept must the rejected have been? Why so angry? Because it's a travesty - there are art clubs throughout the country which could have produced painters far more capable than these, and the drivel spouted about artistic passion, was it? I know this piffle is written for the reverend gentleman to spout, but that's still no excuse for spouting it. If you were TRYING to prove that amateur painters are dilettantes with hooves for hands, the eyes of bats, the colour vision of dogs, the brush-handling skills of a sedated sloth, you really couldn't have done a better job. A shameful waste of time.
Posted
After last weeks debacle I did promise myself not to watch it again and I didn't. I was one of the first to comment last week as I recall and wondered perhaps if I had gone too far with my somewhat scathing remarks as it became clear later that many of you enjoyed the programme. However, after reading Sally's (our editor) leader page in the current edition of The Artist I saw a different side to the programme, namely that it was TV entertainment which had priority over a pure art programme.
I then wrote and did in fact backtrack on some of my comments but on reading Robert's superbly written and even entertaining piece above I feel compelled to download last night's edition and have a look, therefore having the benefit of the 'fast forward' button. I don't believe for one minute that Robert is exaggerating but I will have to see it for myself, seeing is believing as the saying goes.