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Express yourself with art

I once fingerpainted a picture with weird textiles and stuff, on a beach, cherry beach Toronto with this lady and remember at times thinking it was a magic potion. Collaborative work. Strange day, the cops came in and busted it up. It was a huge soundsystem rig. You'd never think people would risk that, but they do, all the time, in various places.

Posts: 678
Express yourself with art

Posts: 678
Express yourself with art

Posts: 512
Express yourself with art

If that's how you naturally express yourself, that's insane.

If that's something you've acquired, I sort of feel sorry for you?

Posts: 678
Express yourself with art

No. Why?

Posts: 678
Express yourself with art

Posts: 109
Express yourself with art

 

by pikey

 

by Aurora Borealis

 That's  probably the shittiest drawing i've seen in a very long time.  Max effort, zero ability. Awful on every possible level. 

Just curious why did you post it as "art"?  

 

 

 

 

 

 Lol, only someone who doesn't MAKE art would say "zero" ability about this picture. Get your talentless ass out of there, art snob.

I hate people who critique art when the only fucking thing they can draw is a blank.

Posts: 678
Express yourself with art

Posts: 10
Express yourself with art

 

by NojuanEspecial

 

by pikey

 

by Aurora Borealis

 That's  probably the shittiest drawing i've seen in a very long time.  Max effort, zero ability. Awful on every possible level. 

Just curious why did you post it as "art"?  

 

 

 

 

 

 Lol, only someone who doesn't MAKE art would say "zero" ability about this picture. Get your talentless ass out of there, art snob.

I hate people who critique art when the only fucking thing they can draw is a blank.

Lol.
Gotta love it when people talk out of their arses.
First off, I do make art which i sell to galleries, where people buy it for a decent sum. I also happen to have a pretty good acclaim by those so-called “art snobs”, whenever i put out a piece. So there. (Not my main line of work though, which is trade & design (much easier) - just when i have the time / am in the mood for it.)
Just curious: what exactly made you think that i can’t draw, and state it as a fact?

But it’s besides the point anyway - you don’t have to be an artist to tell art apart from shit. (Same way as you don’t have to be a chef to tell apart food from shit, etc.) Most art- (& literature- / theatre- / music- etc.) critics are not artists either, they are professionals with an extensive knowledge in their chosen field. And you are a dimwit.

Well you caught me in a good mood so i’ll drone on for a bit longer for your own personal betterment’s sake, i’m an altruist like that. Not giving a full laundry list of all what is wrong with this artwork, just touching on the most glaringly obvious bits, trying to phrase it in a way you can understand.

What we have at hand is a ‘portrait’ of a young female (presumably the “artist’s” idealised self-portrait) with a “dreamy” expression in graphite, with 1970s-style pop-album psychedelia sprouting out of her skull in coloured medium (watercolour markers, likely?).

Now, if by some miracle that girl came to life from its 2D paper form, it would be a grotesquely & hideously deformed non-human freak creature, sort of Frankenstein’s monster. (The hand being the most glaring eyesore even for the partially blind and/or retarded, but all the rest is all the same). Which is fine & dandy as long as grotesque & ugly is the intended outcome, but somehow i doubt it was the case with this drawing. The ‘artist’ was aiming for photorealism, no less. Which is something you won’t attempt until you possess at least the requisite minimum grasp on human anatomy, which the ‘artist’ clearly hasn’t - nor likely ever will. (It takes only practice & comprehension, even the not particularly gifted can learn it. FYI even all the most "far-out" abstract painters (like Mondrian, Rothko, Kandinsky etc.) could draw you a fully photorealistic human figure with their left feet, eyes closed, in 34 seconds.. That’s only the most basic routine of the trade, like knowing the Latin alphabet for a linguist.)
So much about verisimilitude. Apparently the ‘artist’ did put a painstakingly grand (labourous and time-consuming) effort into the execution, which s/he could’ve invested into learning the basics (like human anatomy, and how to capture it) instead.

Then there’s the technique. Shading  is done with graphite, not with eraser/blender retroactively. (In my secondary school (wasn’t even an art school) the teacher used to pelt us with small sharp objects and scathing remarks if he caught us using eraser (other than putty for charcoal), eraser was banned from drawing classes. And rightly so. (He was in fact a damn good top-league painter (abstract sort) in my old country. Been sheer luck having him as a teacher, i owe heaps to that man.)
Technique, knowledge/mastering of materials/medium -  account for at least half. You can be mediocre shit and still make passable stuff (art) if you got those right.

Now to ze message (or as they say the meaning). Some say there ought to be an alluded one different from the depicted - in some cases yes absolutely, in others notsomuch. (Like, the perfectly ambient arrangement of a freshly shot pheasant, bunch of red grapes, a heavy silver candlestick and two lemons on a slab of Ferrara marble would hardly carry a meaning other than of itself, yet it makes perfectly good Italian baroque art. Or, for that matter, a very visually appealing sequence of coloured squares translates to “bedouin campfire in the desert at sundown”, if we talk about abstract art. The blueprint (structure) is reducted/abstracted thus embedded, so you can fill out/embroider the blank particulars with 19th c. realism in your head if that’s your thing.)
Now, the message of our drawing here appears to be a young lady trapped (imprisoned!!) in a “grey”, “monochrome”, “dull” (& all what those adjectives generally imply) world with “bright”, “colourful”, oh-so-quirky and unique star/heart/rainbow-shaped, primary-coloured, free-spirited kindergarten imagery spilling out of her cranium through a hole on the right handside. I take it was intended as an allegory of “inner beauty” (that’s a weird imaginary organ only fat chicks claim to have).
Deep.

 Even IF (let’s grant that generous IF) the style and technique was passable or even good, that deep message (“meaning”) alone would still plop the image to the bottomest rank of godawful kitsch. (You can be a virtuoso and still churn out crap - many do, it pays nicely. You can also be a naïf but with genuine "message" - still integer. But zero on all sides does spell failure.)

Anyhow. If that drawing was made by someone older than 12 years, s/he should have a reality check.

If i happen to be in the mood again i might dig up my pencilbox to show you how to do it somewhat properly, resembling to actual human anatomy in greyscale / to lurid “abstract” imagery in multicolour. Will take only a small fraction of the time it took me to type out this long-ass post (which wasn’t a lot of time to begin with, but drawing is a lot quicker than writing).

I think i mentioned before that self-expression is not art by itself. It’s only self-expression. Most people’s selves are better left unexpressed, there’s already way too much inane rubbish floating about. Why add to the scrapheap.

(And in case if you’re wondering - no, i don’t consider myself an ‘artist’ (only other people call me that). I have my own standards which i don’t fulfill, Ima snob like that. I only do it as the occasional money-making spin when in dire need of money, Art is hard work.)

So, Nojuan_especial, care to share with me the thougth process leading to this statement of yours: 

only someone who doesn't MAKE art would say "zero" ability about this picture.

- which aspects exactly of this picture prompted you to make the above statement?  I'm curious as always. 


Y’know, even the clumsiest, least dexterous / least visually attuned classmates in my old non-artsy secondary school would have done leagues better than that godawful preteen crap, so i’m asking you not only on my behalf.  

 

 

I hate people who critique art when the only fucking thing they can draw is a blank.

As i said up there, filling the blank with shape, structure & colour is hard work. Drawing a blank isn't that bad at all, at least it's a clean neutral. Filling the blank with self-expressive diarrhÅ“a is bad. Like a fart in the elevator. 

 

 

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TL:DR |  Roughly 80% kitsch / 20% passable work in this thread, slightly better than the gross internet average.  

 

 

 

Posts: 3882
Express yourself with art

"TL:DR | Roughly 80% kitsch / 20% passable work in this thread, slightly better than the gross internet average."

Who cares, the main focus is on people expressing themselves not the quality of the pictures/paintings. No need to get all anal about art, the definition varies from person to person anyhow. It's like arguing to someone about what the definition of love is.

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