Art illiteracy

When was the last time you went to a museum, bought an art book or stopped for 10 minutes to look at a work of art you came across online? Probably you are missing something from the beauty of life. It can be taught, going deeper in an image and taking out the juice of joy, of being alive and deciding for yourself what makes you grow (as opposed to doing what everyone else does, because it’s trendy). But most people hate learning and we have the parents and the schools to thank for that. Most people “read” an image at the surface, this is how we got to the point of valuing the “new and shocking”, this is why “artists” such as Demien Hirst, Tracy Emin, etc exist: they “challenge your brains” and move art from what art is good for to snobbing you with “I thought of this first!”. We all look at a van Gogh, we all see a different thing, we all understand a different thing. That understanding of art is not done with the brain. That special understanding is made in a state of being which, if not developed and kept alive, is drying out. And so, we become beings chasing something we think we know, to fill a hole in ourselves that we think we understand.

Draw, don't trace

Drawing Ability Has Psychological Basis In Perception And Memory, Researchers Say

By: Natalie Wolchover 
Published: 04/24/2012 05:57 PM EDT on Lifes Little Mysteries

Since the dawn of human art-making, the divide has been clear: There are people who can effortlessly sketch an object's likeness, and people who struggle for hours just to get the angles and proportions right (by which point the picture is scarred by eraser marks, anyway). What separates the drawers from the drawer-nots?

Ongoing research is revealing the answer to this longstanding question. It seems that realistic drawing ability hinges on three factors: how a person perceives reality, how well he or she remembers visual information from one moment to the next, and which elements of an object he or she selects to actually draw.

If you're stuck on stick figures, the good news, according to researchers at the University College London, is that people can improve at all these mental processes with practice.

First, people who can't draw well aren't seeing the world as it really is. When we look at an object, our visual systems automatically misjudge such attributes as size, shape and color; research over the past three years shows at least some of these misperceptions translate into drawing errors. Paradoxically, in other circumstances the misperceptions help us make sense of the world. For example, objects appear larger when they are closer than when they are far away. Even so, the visual system practices "size constancy" by perceiving the object as being approximately one size no matter how far away it is. The visual system, "knowing" a distant object is really bigger than it appears, sends false information to the brain about what the eyeball is seeing.

People who have the most trouble judging apparent size, shape, color and brightness may also be the worst at drawing, recent research by Justin Ostrofsky and his colleagues at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York suggests. Those who draw well are better able to override these visual misperceptions and perceive what their own eyeballs are really seeing. [Red-Green & Blue-Yellow: The Stunning Colors You Can't See]

However, inaccurately perceiving the image is only part of the story, said Rebecca Chamberlain, a psychologist at University College London. Chamberlain and her colleagues recently conducted experiments investigating the role of visual memory in the drawing process. They believe that drawing skill results in part from an ability to remember simple relationships in an object ? such as an angle between two lines ? from the moment the angle is perceived to the moment it is drawn. Additionally, "drawing seems to involve focusing on both holistic proportional relationships as well as focus on detail isolated from the whole. Perhaps it is the ability to switch between these two modes of seeing that underpins successful drawing," Chamberlain told us.

Furthermore, as detailed in December in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Ostrofsky and his colleagues found significant evidence that skilled artists are better at selecting which elements of an object need to be included to convey the object's form. And once the artists have selected an important element, they are better at focusing their attention on it and ignoring extraneous details nearby.

The devil is in the details, and the researchers are still working out the interplay between all the factors that affect drawing accuracy. However, they can all be learned. "There is no doubt that practice is an important component of being able to draw," Chamberlain said. While some may be predisposed to be better at perceptual accuracy and visual memory than others, "the rest of us use tricks to emulate this." 

In research presented at a recent symposium at Columbia University and soon to be published by Columbia University Press, Chamberlain and her colleagues found practicing drawing significantly improved people's abilities over time, as rated by other people who participated in the study.

Based on their research, the psychologists recommended the following techniques for getting better at drawing: Focus on scaling a drawing to fit the size of the paper; anchor an object in its surroundings by showing how it sits in space; focus on the distance between elements of the object and on their relative sizes; and focus on the size and shape of "negative space," or the empty space between parts of the object. Lastly, they recommend thinking of "lines" as what they really are -- boundaries between light and dark areas.

As Chris McManus, a member of the research team, noted, "There are few human skills which don't improve with practice."

the Contemporary Male Nude in Art

I think I came in too fast with the idea for this blog. I wanted to promote awareness for the male nude but I didn’t have a strong plan to do so. Though I see/discover more contemporary artists who acknowledge drawing as a Serious Art on its own, the male nude doesn’t move away from the pinup/porn visual department. The Cock is mostly viewed as the male sex organ, porn symbol, PG rated. The Ancients regarded it with different eyes and I was trying to bring that idea forth. I confess, my own drawings were not sufficiently creative in this respect.

The male nude pose that I mostly encounter in contemporary visuals is the superhero pose or the city-office metrosexual, skinny, frustrated. I’ll continue to watch this.

The rest, as I said, is “here I am, hunky, beefy and here’d my dick!”.  My sense of Art refuses to be uplifted by such representations of the male nudity.

And then came Lucian Freud, which is an Artist I still have to digest, as he brought to the table a view which is larger than what I can take in such a short time. The immediate “diagnostic” is that his Art manages to void me of anything I already have in myself, transport me to his world and therefore fills me with new sensations and emotional “understanding”. And this is what I want Art to do for me.

As the Alchemists used to say, a Painting must look at you, to make you look at her.

Drawing: slowly making a come back. Hopefully!

These days drawing still suffers from the anti-tradition sentiment that has been with us for a few decades. Many art schools are only now getting back to teaching the subject... ...Another problem is that many collectors still don't see stand-alone drawing as a collectible. It's unfortunate, because drawing has its own unique delight for both the doer and the viewer. Let's face it, drawing skills have largely fallen on hard times. A few years ago it was nearly a dead art. Lots of folks still think they don't need it. 

While painting can often be brought back and upgraded by a strong shot of desire, it's been my experience that drawing, not practiced, soon becomes rusty. Ordinary drawing is okay and useful, but above all it's an opportunity for "line style." Expressive, searching, definitive, linear, broken, lost and found, there's an energy in line that tone and form do not have. In drawing, artists have to determine whether the objects or ideas drawn are suitable for line--or would they be best suited for mass and area. For subjects with what I call "inner glow," such as faces and the nuances of nature, line can take second place. Think of trying to stretch a coat hanger around a cloud. But line is of value for its own sake and can carry its own meaning. Paul Klee noted that "a line is a dot that went for a walk." More creators and more collectors need to be taken on that walk. Edgar Degas noted, "Drawing is a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, an artist's true personality." A student who sees progress in drawing gains the greatest self-esteem. For that reason alone artists ought to be drawing like crazy. When Michelangelo died, a note for one of his assistants was found on the studio floor: "Draw, Antonio, draw. Draw and do not waste time.

Here come the Russians (part4)

I think Evolution is responsible for everything it is right now and will continue to transform life, us. Sometimes and earth quake, a schism takes place and everyone is running in all directions, screaming. When the dust from their feet and the noise from their lungs settles and dies out, Evolution picks up the thread, from wherever it was dropped. Most of our (Western) contemporary art is that scream of agony. This is why it doesnt resonate in me, doesnt touch me with the beauty that serious Art does.
Here's the work of a Russian student, living as we speak, in Russia, studying at the Art Academy. I hope his soul will not be devoured by the bitch Goddess of fame. I hope his days in training will beget works of art which will stand tall, when the rubble is cleaned.

Work, May 2012

D0g-Man

Shirley the Bouncer

study in blue

study in 3 crayons

Bobby Kennedy (November 20, 1925 – June 6, 1968)

Tragedy unremembered,
Violence,
a great loss for all.