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Vettriano revisited
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Posted
I didn't read the second article until coming back from th'ospital this afternoon, but have read it now.
The writer tells us that tonal values disappeared from artists' practice "at the end of the 19th century" - which was 1899/1900. I should have thought as a statement that was difficult to defend in every case, but he does have a point - even if I think he exaggerates it. (Tonal values haven't disappeared from my painting practice, to start with, but then I doubt he's familiar with the Jones oeuvre [one never knows, of course] and they haven't disappeared from others either. But I have wondered before now if the proliferation of new colours that came in in the late 19th century - the chromes,the cadmiums in particular, and all the new colours we have today - pthalocyanines, naphthols, pyrroles, perylenes, quinacridones [wish this didn't sound like My First Chemistry Set]- didn't combine to push tonal values to one side; because what once had to be done by [largely] glazing over underpainting, enhanced with lead white, can now be accomplished with different colours rather than with different tones. Painters of the pre-colour explosion generation might have half a dozen colours on their palette, possibly slightly more - and without a mastery of tone, their work would have been extremely flat. I wondered this all the more when I read the advice of a writer - which I can only recommend you reject - to employ "purple for all your shadows" - the accompanying illustration being one of the more ghastly things I'd seen for a long time.)
So OK so far, with reservations. And we can all deplore that trend, the dearth of good painting and drawing education in the places where you'd have expected to find them, and more. But - perhaps I need to read the piece again - he does then go on to slip rather abruptly into a diatribe against conceptual art, which I don't think has anything to do with the points he raised about painting. He thinks it's all of a piece, I believe - perhaps he's right; and he's only got a short space to say all this, and the article is, I think, part of a series. But I'm not sure the argument works. I don't find conceptual art interesting in any way, nor has it anything to do with what I'm trying to do. But does this part of the argument follow from the first?
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
Thanks Pat -- I've got a three month wait for the actual operation,but all the preliminaries are done and the extent of the problem identified. What I find fascinating is that my right eye is more or less useless, but the left eye still works - however, if I close the right eye, I can't see; I suppose because they're used to working together and focussing comes into play. Presumably one gets used to this, or people with only one eye couldn't manage.. So I'll muddle on, and be patient.
The language of our times .... the abuse, the anger, the hatred; it seems to me to be getting worse in part because the internet/"social media" (anti-social media, if you ask me) has allowed people to think they can swear and be insensitive and boorish, and so they are, in every walk of life. Probably people of our age are more sensitive to the swearing than the young, to whom it seems to come all too readily, but separating the foul language (as I'm sure we'd express it) from the venom, it's the latter that bothers me more. I can tolerate swearing, but I stop people if they start doing it in front of me - which sometimes pulls them up short, and sometimes leaves them speechless (which can be a good thing...); but I can't be doing with the sheer unreasoning anger that is seizing so many these days: anger that's not matched very often by any constructive action - and I don't call marching about with placards "action ", either.
Perhaps we're all fortunate that we can pour our emotions into our work, because I'd rather attack a canvas than a person, even if the results can be just as bloody.....
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
Hope this is the right spot to put a link to the latest essay by Charles Harris on modern art https://realistart.wordpress.com/2016/11/05/thoughts-on-modern-contemporary-art/
Posted
Trouble is, Pat, that Harris is such a dreadful writer - there are sentences in that piece that don't make any sense at all, and others which desperately lack a verb. He's got a thin idea - he believes that conceptual art by and large isn't art at all, and that "modern art" is in general free of skill and ability (or at least, I think that's what he thinks: from the start of this series it hasn't been clear) - and he's stretching it out at great length because he seems completely incapable of encapsulating it all in one article. He needs an editor and a proof-reader - no publication should be allowing spelling like "publically" to start with.
Traditional skills need a champion, and the trend of contemporary art criticism needs to be taken to pieces and re-made - but writing like this is too easy to dismiss, and it will be dismissed. What's needed is a critic of the stature of the late Robert Hughes (who famously told a collector that the painting on his wall contrasted deeply unfavourably with the view from his window): I don't know if Charles Harris has the reputation to be taken seriously, but sadly he lacks the ability to back it up with the written word if he has.
As to whether he's right or not - I suspect there are few admirers of conceptual art to be found on POL, and I'm certainly not one of them. But in these three articles, I've been looking for Harris to draw a distinction between the conceptual and what he means by modern art, even to give a few actual examples - we're on his third article and he still hasn't done that: I'm yearning for him to say what he actually MEANS, and infuriatingly he hasn't. I'm quite sure he doesn't mean that anything that might conceivably be labelled "modern art" should be tipped into the Grand Union Canal, and I'm equally sure that some of it should, but it's quite impossible to know what he means by the term - throw a few names out: does he mean Picasso? Dalí, Whiteread, Rothko, Scully, Doig, Liechtenstein, Warhol, Pollock, Hodgkin? If not, who? If so, who else?
So far as I'm concerned, you could take every piece of conceptual art I've ever seen and simply erase it from the collective memory, and I don't believe we'd have lost a thing that was worth having. You could take every critic who has praised it and melt them down to make soap, and we'd be marginally better off: at least we'd have some soap. But Harris takes as blunt an instrument to "modern art" as did Dr Goebbels, who at least expressed his hatred of it rather more pithily. This is sad, and a wasted opportunity, for there's much that could be said about the lure of the brash, the grotesquely overpriced, the cynicism of certain galleries and their greed, the you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours of the art market, but Harris flails around with words like "stupid", and "silly", as though in the abstract they meant anything, and doesn't come to the flaming point!
http://www.isleofwightlandscapes.net
http://www.wightpaint.blogspot.co.uk
Posted
Well Robert, You´ve got a point. Charles obviously feels strongly about the matter. If you want to know more about him, he is on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Harris_(painter)
Perhaps he should be more specific about his criticism as you have suggested. I´ll get in touch with him. Perhaps he can do that in his next essay.
Posted
Although this has nothing to do with Vettriano it goes with the previous line of discussion. Just wanted to let you know Charles Harris has published a couple of new articles about art and art education since my last posting. You will find them listed here. https://realistart.wordpress.com/2016/11/05/thoughts-on-modern-contemporary-art/
This post has been removed as it violates our forum rules and guidelines.
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