06 Monday Jul 2015
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Art for Dummies?
My father was an accountant by profession and had a passion for numbers. In his world of facts and figures, painting and art had only hobby status. The anti-establishment psychedelic sixties probably had something to do with his opinions. A few decades since and we look upon a different world.
I suspect some of us still view art with ’tongue in cheek’ and dismiss it as being merely pretty pictures to adorn one’s home with. True?
11 Wednesday Feb 2015
“There is no such thing as good painting about nothing” Mark Rothko
Don’t let formal tuition kill your passion
As an artist, do you approach your work with sincerity?Has your art become meaningless? Perhaps you have become a lofty art-academic who has been taught how to ‘make’ something ‘look like’ something else?
Stifling the free spirit with technical trivia
Perhaps you have been tutored (by the finest) on the art of ’portraiture ’and with more than a reasonable resemblance to the sitter can replicate his physical image on canvas. You might have learned how to paint the perfect landscape using all the tried and tested techniques and formulae of composition, colour and tone, but I don’t see any risk element of excitement there. Painting can become so dreary, you may even wonder why bother at all?
With a bit of caution, you might have tried your hand at a bit of abstraction.But can you answer the question as to what measure of the real you, you allow into your paintings?
27 Tuesday Jan 2015
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Getting noticed
It has taken millennia for us to evolve into the intelligent, socially aware and civilized beings we like to think of as ourselves today. But perhaps some of our primal urges have been left intact, and I am not referring to our core instincts that enable us to keep Homo Sapiens on the map like eating and breathing.
There seems to be an urge deep within us to leave something, visual or tangible in our wake for others to see. Is it akin to the territorial instinct of our dearest canine friend that necessitates him to leave his mark on a lamppost? Do we also have a need to leave a mark not only to claim territory but as an exclamation of a rule and maybe superiority? Or is it to validate our existence?Speaking for myself, I am quite content to confine my mark making to the canvas.
