Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to art. This "art themed" cloud looming over my head was most likely birthed by my Origins of Modernism class I am currently taking, and loooooving. Anywho my professor was talking about.......(enter name of 1930's french Marxist who by the 1950's recanted most of his leftist beliefs and whose name completely escapes me) and how in the mid 20th century he deemed modernism as being about one and only one thing: flatness. He said that what set modernist art apart from every other period of art and kept it from simply being some trendy fad that a bunch of french commies jumped on, was the modernist's recognition that painting was all about two dimensions. He claimed that all those really smart dead guys who did a bunch of cool stuff in Italy that would later be called The Renaissance, actually had the whole painting thing completely wrong. Painting, in its essence, is all about recognizing first and foremost that it is, in actuality, simply the placing of paint on a flat surface. You absolutely should not be trying to make things that have two dimensions look as though they have three...because they do not. Modernist painting recognized that all they were given was two dimensions, and they worked with that, and did a darn good job if you ask me. Aaaaanywho, things like this make me think about my own experience with art and what it means. Let me go ahead and say I am the harshest critic of myself. I have done maybe two complete works with paint that I am actually happy with.....ever. That being said I often wonder if I am truly putting myself into what I am doing. I find myself thinking that my art is simply an expression of my brain's interpretation of visual stimulants I've taken in that are deemed acceptable by a cultural sector known as the art world. I've had a lot of ideas floating around in my head as of late, but simply have not had the time to invest in them. My wish is simply that some day I will look at my art objectively and be able to pick it out of crowd of finger paintings and trash glued to canvas and say that, at the very least, I expressed part of my experience, while still allowing the art to live and breath and grow somewhat on its own (and to hopefully not write run-on sentences anymore). And no that part about the art living wasn't me trying to sound "avant-garde" or "hip" or like thick rimmed glasses, beards, and PBR were the greatest things to ever happen to me.....I genuinely meant and believe it. Nighty Night.
P.S. I loved watching Bryce go bonkers tonight :)
No comments:
Post a Comment