Friday, January 25, 2008

It's that time of the year again! (yikes)

I guess you thought I'd disappeared for good; I haven't posted for almost a year. I'll try to make more of an effort from now on though. I've been busy painting and trying to build up a portfolio in time for the application season, which is only about a month away. It sounds easy, doesn't it.

It's not, trust me. I can be working on a painting for weeks until it's nearly finished, "it just needs a liiiittle more..." and then I end up doing something horribly which seemed like a good idea at the time, but does in fact ruin the whole painting and I have to start all over again. It's something I have to get used to, I do recognize that, but it's getting harder to take since I'm not officially an art student anymore. Since I wasn't accepted to the Academy and there were too many applicants for the one year course in art history, I signed up for a one year course in religion studies instead.

It's been fascinating so far; a lot of the lectures include information that can be useful in a lot of situations and that also has a relation to art (ethics, philosophy, ancient Greece). The hard part is to juggle my studies with my painting - I feel like I must be 100% commited to both things. If i'm in a hyper-creative phase I tend to miss lectures, and I don't know if I should feel bad or accept that it's a necessary consequence.

Oh, and you've probably noticed that my web site has been taken down. Don't worry, it's only temporarily. I'm working on a new site with a more 'professional' approach which will hopefully give the site a bit more credibility.

Which brings me to another subject (I'm rambling). The decision of making a new web site was made partly by the response I got when I posted a link at a message board in which I'm an active member. It seems that people who have no experience in art (and may be more fascinated by art than actually interested in it) immediately favoured the one painting I was embarassed to have uploaded in the first place - the snow landscape with the descending sun. My sister, who has a genuine interest and also experience in art, asked me in earnest when she saw it was online, if I'd uploaded it as a joke. My mother compared it to an "etude" - something pleasing to the senses but lacking of depth and expression. The painting is too much of a cliché to be taken seriously - yet it's what 'the people' love.

My question is: Is the definition of being a talented artist to make things look exactly as in reality? That you can draw or paint any person, on command, and make it look exactly like the original? When I was younger, about 11 or 12, I was frequently told I should become and artist, based on my ability to draw a reasonable likeness of Nick Carter from a picture. It gave me a sort of status until I started studying graphic design and was told that my drawing abilites would be of less use - The emphasis was on the creative prosess; inventiveness, the ability to let go of the boundaries in one's head. When I started studying art for real, there was of course a great focus on learning the technique; anatomy, colours, mediums, but gradually we were also taught the importance of using art as a tool of expression. Dare to be curious, raise questions, discover unexpected things in the routines of everyday life. I've embraced this philosophy and try my best to live by it - to always work with that theory in mind.

What then if I create a series of paintings that really express my thoughts and feelings on a certain subject, but don't fit into "the man in the street's" perception of what good art should be? Will people have to be educated art critics in order to find any meaning or beauty in my works; is the ordinary man's perception of beauty a certain formula that can't be changed?

Maybe it boils down to the fact that we're afraid of things we don't understand. If a painting doesn't meet our expectations in terms of what good art should be - obviously something that involves shapes and colours that can easily be interpreted by our eyes and thus gives us some kind of meaning - we don't understand it and it is "not good".

I begin to realize I could go on and on about this but I'll spare you for that. Feel free to carry on the debate by commenting.

In closing, and completely off topic, I recommend iTunes/iPod users to subscribe to Tate's Podcast series "TateShots". It's brilliant and includes interviews with artists, special news stories and exhibition previews.