DavPaz wrote:
Some of the student work I see every day is utter trash because they've just copied something else and tried to capture someone else's lightning. That's no good, you need to produce your own work, even if it is clumsy and hard to understand.
This is one of the reasons I gave up on art before I finished it at GCSE. All the teachers cared about was making everyone imitate other people, and putting out derivative crap in massive volume. The bloke sitting opposite me who drew a terrific picture with chalk over several weeks got criticised because in the same time, a bunch of other people had shat out five tedious paintings or collages that were lauded because they were clearly made in an attempt to be like Monet or Picasso or ... er... El Famoso.
That and I got shit for doing what I was good at and enjoyed, rather than doing things I knew I had no grasp of and didn't like anyway. The time I tried, for the sake of giving it a go, a medium I knew I hated, I got a "That's nice... MAKE A MASK OF IT!!" What? Fuck off, what the hell am I going to do with a mask?
Also I was doing twelve other subjects and really could not be arsed with them all, so.
Quote:
Just go and see one of his wonderful paintings in the flesh
The difference this makes with pretty much any art can't really be overstated. When I was working for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, there was a big fuss about the portrait of him that was unearthed, that our bloke was claiming is overwhelmingly likely to be a life portrait of his life, painted when he was alive, in his lifetime. Live.
Have a look in the papers, or in pamphlets or whatever, and you can see some resemblance to later works (which were supposedly copied from copies of this one), and it's interesting and all. But the first I saw of it was when the painting itself came to our archive for safekeeping. Naturally, once it was safe, the first thing I did was go back up for the camera and take pictures of myself posing next to Shakespeare with a thumbs up and a stupid grin, each of which would have got me triple fired if I'd shared them with anyone who I didn't trust.
But anyway, my point. What the pictures couldn't capture was that this thing, whether it's really him or not, was so full of life. It has an expression in the eyes and brow, and the mouth, that you just can't really see except in person. I'm sure it's true of many other works.