Old Vs. new art conundrum

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This topic has 6 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 9 years, 8 months ago by Voice-of-Grace.

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November 28, 2013 at 8:01 pm #45932

Omion
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Hi all,

I’m a student at art school and really like drawing and painting and am inspired by the greats of recent history from Goya, Manet, Picasso, and abstract expressionists like Helen Frankenthaler and Motherwell. But all the art I see these days getting sold and being popular really doesn’t engage me at all. Mostly I feel annoyed by it, occasionally shocked or just bored.

I love the idea of learning the fundamentals of drawing and painting through discipline and practice and then having fun experimenting with it. I spend hours looking through books on abstract art and am most happy in the quiet, creative solitude of my studio. But I do feel like I’m in a bit of a time warp. I want to find a group of artists to meet up with like I imagine Picasso, Matisse and the other Parisian creatives used to do. Instead I go to art gallery openings and other venues and find ‘artists’ talking a lot but without much substance or genuine interest in art besides their own. It seems like there is too much ego in the art world these days and nobody is really interested in creating slow, meaningful work. It’s all fast, fast, fast surface art!

I wonder if anyone else has had thoughts about this? If so, I’d love to have someone to talk to about it 🙂

Thanks for reading!

November 28, 2013 at 9:40 pm #45935

Hee
Participant

Hi Ominion,

So you are saying some artists are not open to other artist’s work? Due to their high ego…? I think it’s a problem if an artist is not open to works other than his or her own, hence narrow perspective…

I agree, it’s interesting to learn about what makes and distinguishes classical / historical artists from one another. Just like how I do enjoy hearing the works of a great classical composer (something I can recall) in mid of a classical music performance.

Would be nice to see someone create an awesome, inspiring, historically changing art…

…But your post really made me want to share my visiting remembrance from one museum….

I don’t know what it’s supposed to represent, but I saw an art piece presented at MOMA San Francisco (I think… Or it could be somewhere else) and it was a portrait of a bread slice. My sister and I laughed soooo much without trying to catch attention from other visitors… Of all that I could think of from that museum, that slice of white and not wheat bread stuck to my head till this day. We’re like joking and said like, “oh we could eat that…”

It was really new, but it was very interesting.

🙂

November 29, 2013 at 7:16 am #45939

Anonymous
Inactive

I think I understand – I have had a similar experience. I live in New York City, so of course there is a huge art community. However, it sometimes seems that the art community consists more of creating buzz or generating celebrity and your ability to “sell” your work than the actual art itself. I’m sure this is not true always, but it certainly seems that way. Everyone is very worried about the celebrity of being an art star and not so worried about the work. I do understand that if you want to do it for a living, you have to be able to sell it, but it seems like putting the cart before the horse when the ability to sell, talk up, creat buzz, about your work becomes more important than the actual thing you’re selling. The networking takes up an incredible amount of time and becomes an end in itself. That’s a large part of what I see as contributing to the issue you’re discussing, at least here. I have spent years longing for the type of community you’re talking about. And I also really love Matisse, Picasso, and other greats of that period.

November 29, 2013 at 4:19 pm #45959
Omion
Participant
Thank you! I am yet to get to NYC but with all the history there I can’t wait! I live in Sydney, Australia, so we have a relatively small art community here. But I think this brings up another influence in art today, which is that it really doesn’t matter where the artist physically is as long as they have access to the internet. I am an artist in Sydney, talking to you, an artist in New York-who I have never physically met and knew nothing about before this conversation. I guess this is a positive thing in that it allows us to exchange ideas and can encourage creativity but it also means that groups of artists in set locations like the New York abstract expressionists or the French modernists will never really get the chance to form because contact with the ‘outside’ is too much in a way. Art forms and styles these days perhaps don’t get the time to evolve, which might be why there does not seem to be a cohesive thread of ideas or a confident vision for artists. I sort of imagine it like how different species evolve over time through isolation and by the influence of their environment. I don’t know, maybe I’m getting off topic now!
- This reply was modified 11 years ago by Omion.
January 13, 2014 at 11:44 am #49049

Jolie B.
Participant

Hi there. I also am an art student, and like you I admire the works of the masters, and am learning fundamentals that should be used in every painting and drawing. Like you, I sometimes go to art events and look at what is being promoted as “art” and wonder why anyone would bother with some of the junk that is being sold. I have come to accept that artistic expression is so personal, that maybe its my inability to see what the abstract, assemblage, raw art movement is about. What has helped me the most, is to stop looking at junk art, and concentrate on what I am trying to express. I think, just like in fashion, a lot of art out there today is flash in the pan and won’t sustain itself. I love the Impressionist period and street scape, and land scape compositions because I can interpret that reality. So, I think your observations are right on.

January 23, 2014 at 3:43 pm #49636

suzanna
Participant

I paint what I like. I don’t care what the masters did. Some of their stuff was good. Some of it junk. Some of it that we’ve been told was good, isn’t. I didn’t learn to paint from a class in college. In college I had other things I had to do. I was paying for it myself and holding a job. I found how-to instructions on PBS. To me, what I think about the art is more important than what anyone else thinks…in terms of my own creativity. Impressionism looks like underpainting to me, and I keep waiting for the person to finish it, even if they are long dead. Or it looks like the person’s eyes are going bad, and they need glasses. It looks blurry. I don’t like abstract either. Some of that looks like what I did in the first grade. At first I painted what the instructors did in the how-to lessions. Then I found books with layouts which gave me step by step. Over time I developed skills…it’s an ongoing process. Now I paint what I would like to see on the walls in my house. I don’t like someone calling a painting good, just because it has good composition. In some of that, the painting is awful, to me. I’m not painting to become famous or sold. I paint ’cause I like it, and it’s good therapy, as trite as that might sound. It’s totally satisfying, and I become absorbed in it. I recently painted a scene I saw in my mind when I meditated. Then I had a heck of a time finding good reference material. My meditation scene did not come with exact details or shadows. But I tell you what, it was so cool to do it.

April 20, 2015 at 9:08 am #75576

Voice-of-Grace
Participant

Wayne Thiebaud? Sounds like something that he would do. He was one of my teachers in school. Was the bread edged with color so that it kind of vibrated—if so, it’s Thiebaud.

And for the rest of you…art school or even the arts department in a university is hard. It’s amazing anyone comes out of that process intact and able to continue to create art. I know that the work done in college was not significant work at all, and even what came out of it for a few years after. So don’t let the bastards get you down.

For a long time, I did not paint, although I am getting there….I’ve found I have a passion for portals, doors, arches…..places where negative space is the big part of the composition. I also really like the abstract in nature….where a small slice becomes this abstract that in itself is interesting. I think it’s about potential, but still processing it.

For a while I was doing work with lots of armless women….which now I look back on and realize it was about a lack of agency in the world, feeling helpless. At some point, they got arms and then it was uninteresting as a topic.
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