I can’t believe how many people are falling for this. This reminds me of when Rodin was falsly accused of making his sculptures through bodycasts.
Hockney is a very eclectic artist and but he’s blowing this out of all proportion. I think he’s influenced by the fact that he himself works from photographs a lot in his own paintings, even though he isn’t a bad draughtsman when he wants to be.
I’m a lot more inclinded to believe living artists who have devoted their lives to learning the craft of drawing and painting in a realistic manner, see the ARC links I posted earlier. I have just begun my journey at one of the ARC approved Ateliers and in the short amount of time I’ve been there it has been continuously stressed that drawing is by far the most important foundation in realistic art. A good draftsman doesn’t need any kind of lense or mirror to create a perfect likeness, it’s all in the trainning.
So to say that masters of the past used mirrors is disrespectful of their talent. (It has been documented that some artists experimented with optics but that’s not the same as saying they used them for all of their work) Can you imaging 500 years from now an artist claiming that Golum started out as a Poser model because the tool existed at the same time and any artist would have used such software to speed up the process…
I’m wondering if this is “Much ado about nothing”. The old masters art wasn’t so much about how closely he/she imitated reality but more about form, color and composition. That’s what made some of these artist great. Not accuracy. Regardless, if they used mirrors or not doesn’t really matter.
Yes, the Dave Hockney book is good on this, but keep in mind, he isn’t saying the Renaissance painters used the lenses, rather the change came right after that with artists such as Caravagio and on, with the influence of the lense technology the dutch painters were developing.
Its easy to see the difference once it is pointed out, and you have an understanding of how the systems available were used.
Rubens, Michelangelo and Rembrandt were draftsmen, and it shows, you can see them feeling for the final lines even in their paintings.
But soon after everyone can produce paintings with a realism that seems beyond what anyone could learn drawing the figure for 4 years in even the best art schools.
Ever wonder why Ingres little portrait drawings were all the same size and look like tracings with no mistakes? Becuase that is what they were.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not criticising here. It is the same today for artists. You may feel that your struggle to develop your art using traditional methods is the best for philosophical reasons, but the kid down the block just bought a quad from BOXX with 64 bit software and he’s going to your clients with faster turn-around and higher quality than you can produce with your 32 bit system. You know what your going to do if your going to stay in the game.
That’s exactly the problem with the majority of the evidence for this claim. Hockney is putting artificial limitations on the quality that it is possible for artists to achieve. That’s not a healthy attitude to pass on. He is saying it is too hard to achieve this, it is impossible to achieve that. Well guess what. It’s not.
What he is saying is as offensive as accusing top athletes of using steroids. Sure, even if they were using steroids it would still be an achievement, but to say that such an accusation doesn’t take away from the achievement is disingenuous.
And if you are wondering how artists could improve so fast, it happens all the time. A good teacher with the right methods can make a vast difference on a whole generation of artists.
Ultimately even Hockney himself is forced to admit that we can never know, that there is no real evidence. The most he can say is ‘they could have done it, sometimes, with great difficulty, and in heavily guarded secrecy’. Of all his claims, the only one I find the slightest bit credible is that witnessing something like a camera obscura might have helped artists think outside the box of what had come before.
I have to concur with the poster who said he was rather shocked that most people are taken in by this, infact someone said he/she thought this was common knowledge.
Most of Hockney’s ideas come from the fact that there is a lack of evidence. His train of thought seems to be, this is too hard to do-lack of evidence to support they could do this-must of used optical devices, but this is absurd.
From Vasari onwards there have been extensive biographies and autobiographies of various artist, well known and not so well know, and we are expected to beleive that they all kept this secret. That’s a conspiracy theory right up there with the Illuminati, in relation to the scale of such an endeavour, and if turns out to be true I take my hat off to almost every artist worth his salt for the last five hundred years.
Historical relavitism should not be tolerated and this is just another sad sad example.
Actually, Hockney was demonstrating things such as camera perspective distortion that is evident in the samples he discusses. You can see for instance, in some of the still life paintings, where 4 different camera perspectives have been composited, and using a modern camera can exactly simulate the distortions.
As for the Ingres drawing, Hockney within a few weeks produced comperable drawings using the portable camera lense technique.
I don’t think the issue should be between technology and creativity, as if they were antithetical, rather it should be the creative use of technology.
As long as the artist leads the process, and not the other way around, there will be art, not artifacts.
I think the comparisson between Ingres’ beautiful portrait drawings and Hockney’s attempts using optical aids speak for itself… (see attachments)
Also, when asked why Hockney only demonstrated drawing and not a completed painting, he replied that he had tried painting with his camera obscura, but had abandoned the effort “within ten minutes” because it was far too impractical. So what is he saying here? The masters needed optical devices but it is far too difficult for himself to create something worthwhile with it?
of course they did, same way some contemporary “photo-real” digital artist do today, tracing photografs and overpainting… I don’t know who they try to cheat anyway.
By the way, have you ever read some of those guys bios? damn, most of them looks more like pirates than artists.
I think many current masters can also draw pretty accurately without reference, Check out Dylan cole doing landscapes out of thin air and Glenn Vilppu giving a demonstration, And Stahlberg making beautiful paintovers over drawings/paintings /renders which never had any magic in them,!I dont find it surprising that the old masters did work a lot from imagination apart from life studies for their subjects, hell ,I draw pretty darn accurate stuff from imagination all the time!I do believe there must have been some ppl who might have used faster methods of drawing in those days but ppl like leonardo and michelangelo etc no way one look at their drawings or work and u know.
i agree with Hockney 100%…
also, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods were/are on steroids
Beethovens work was ALL ghost written
classical animation is dead
and Paris Hilton can sing
oh yeah, I feel so much superior thinking this way…
I have a PC and Leonardo just his stupid lenses… I’m so cool…
what are we talking about here?..
c’mon
even if they did…the painting is phenominal! its amazing what artists did back in the day. the best artists in the world came about around the same era. nothing in modern day has happened like that. nothing new and amazing has happened. dont get me wrong. there are many great artists…but we have not made a leap like they did back then. they are the foundation of our arts today. when will a new breed of genius come about?? no one in my eyes will ever be better than the masters. i dont understand why no one will be…but i just dont see it. they were more than just artists. they were scientists and much more. so i give them every bit of admiration.
Why all the fuss about this stuff? A successful painting is far more than just having accurate shapes–there are creative choices in colors, brushwork, selective detail, edge quality, textures, values, including fabrication of subjects that don’t exist in real life (myths, legends, religious images…etc). Anyone who can only trace the outlines but don’t possess all the other skills necessary would never be able to produce a worthwhile painting anyway. Saying that having used lenses back then somehow detracts from the genius of the old masters is probably a bit dramatic.
I think hokney rocks, as it was him against the art market, Looking at those art thinking they were just tracing makes it a lot less genial sometimes even boring. Also now a days there are people that think that imitating a fotocopy aperatus with your bare hands and a pencil is the summit of creativity. An other story I heard was that all the stories of shakespeare werent written by a single man but by a group of people pretending to be one man, my first reaction was this man must have misinterpreteted the word shakespeare company, lol
My tip to all the mediacore artist here is group together and pretend youre one person.
man, and i was just beginning to wonder why somebody would go and discredit some of the greatest artists ever lived, an artist nontheless… then i saw his work. it all makes sense now.
