to clarify my point, one last time, in a slightly different way, as i really did simply want to talk about photorealism in art.
my own personal goal is not to be able to talk about art or be more educated in art than anyone else. i simply want to learn how to create art with greater skill – to create more powerful art. i write, i paint, i play music. to be absolutely clear, i do not even resemble an expert in any of those media. but to claim photorealistic art is boring, and so imply that it is a method no artist should use, aren’t you simply cutting yourself off from another way to express whatever you’re trying to get across?
it is my experience with the real-life artists i have had the pleasure of meeting and talking to that those who stand very firmly against photorealism are the artists who say things such as “art is totally free” and “there are no rules in art.” for the one artists out of a million that learns to create powerful art out of that group, those statements are perfectly correct. i believe one of my favorites – basquiat – is in that group. those are the artists we think of as troubled, who we imagine never make their beds, and eat cereal with a glass of vodka. in reality, however, those artists don’t ever really need to think about the degree to which their paintings represent their actual visual experience. and it should be stressed again that those artists are extremely rare.
the rest of us, however, might take some real time, think very hard, and read books about rules, if they do indeed exist. the degree to which an artist can render the intricacies of the natural visual world may in fact have a relationship with how intersting the line, space, and even color of their non-representational or other abstract art may be. betty edwards, the author of the book i mentioned earlier makes a great statement i think lies at the heart of the discussion of “photorealism” or really just “realism” in terms of HOW WE MAKE ART:
“artists who learn to draw well [ie realistically – her book is about realistic drawing] don’t always produce boring and and pedantic realistic art. the artists who do produce such art would no doubt produce boring and pedantic abstract or nonobjective art as well.”
that there really is enough said on this top. photorealism as a term does include “photo” and so there is a difference between realism and photorealism. however, from what was said prior to my original reply, many of you were mostly disregarding realism in general as boring, not the photorealistic movement. no one’s actual words, but that was the general gist IMHO.
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