Painting

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I googled him and saw some photographs with paint tracked over them, and I figured there must be some laws of painting that he is intimately engaging with. Benefit of the doubt.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
How might image have come to displace painting
I would say by necessity, no? Painting was top dog when it was necessarily the best way of visually representing reality. When a better way came along, painting was dethroned by photography in the reign over the image, in terms of representation, and thus painting had to transmogrify its MO into abstraction, seeing as its prior claim had been annexed by stronger forces.

That would be my crack at it.
 

luka

Well-known member
That's right but no painting can be a good painting unless it's a painting. A painting as image is not worth spit.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
There's a lot of art you see online (on Reddit particular) that aspires to total photorealism. And I mean that it aims to recreate with ink or paint an actual photograph.

While this is always an impressive enough feat, insofar as it requires a lot of patience and skill, I'd argue that it's never really art, because the person with the pen isn't putting anything of themselves into it. There's no creativity involved. It's a trick. There's certainly examples of "proper" artists doing this sort of thing, creating an illusion on the canvas, and often it's extraordinary how they replicate textures and light effects. But it often doesn't communicate a vision. It doesn't communicate a feeling.

I always thought Canaletto was a sort of photographer before the fact, an "image maker" of Venetian scenes. But on recent visits to the NG I've been so impressed and (yup) moved by his landscapes/crowd scenes, the imagination and life he puts in them. There's something about those paintings (beyond even the knowledge that he painted them) that a photograph could never replicate.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I mention Canaletto because he's an example that springs to my mind of a painter of the sort you might say photography killed off and made irrelevant.

Whereas it's easy with painters like Van Gogh and Turner to see that they're doing things with paint that have nothing to do with "straight" representation.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Perhaps what distinguishes the human-paint machine from the camera, both being reality-capturing tools, is that the human-paint machine involves impression and expression, with wiggle room between these phases, in a way that the camera does not. The camera would be more direct, literal, "this is what I see" with no variable of how it is seen.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Lucien Freud is a good example of a modern (enough) representational painter who, again, created images that a photographer would never have created. Aside from even the thick layers of paint, the tactility of the surface, there's also the filter that his models' faces passed through that made them all look a little alike.

Perhaps what distinguishes a painting from an "image" most of all is that sense of an individual sensibility shining through it? (Though there are presumably plenty of paintings - the majority even - that are anonymous and obscure.)
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Also, an important point - the camera might not lie but the human eye does, and therefore a photograph of a landscape e.g. only apparently looks "as it is".

Obviously this is where cubism was coming from - that a still life is artificial, we don't see anything from one vantage point in space or time for very long. Cezanne was the forerunner here, so far as I'm aware, painting landscapes in which nothing is fixed.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Maybe something to do with the material and what you can only achieve in that medium?
I think Ive lost the thread. I thought this conversation was about how an ab ex work like richter's can be an 'image' and not a *painting
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Richter to me looks like ambiguous hotel art that might hang in the bathroom. Cant help that you can see his process right there inherent in the image. Looking at a De Kooning is fun because its hard to tell exactly how it was made, not that thats the end all be all of a works value though
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
I imagine his stuff looks better in person. I really like Twombly but Im not sure thatd be the case if I had only ever seen his stuff online. Theres an emotional component thats relayed in person.
 
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