BUT DOES IT LOOK RIGHT?
But does it look right? (A Blog by Mike Barr)
“The artists I admire the most are those who are able to depict recognisable things and scenes without having to ‘explain’ everything with the brush. I often marvel at paintings that are so complete without reverting to boring swathes of detail.
When we first picked up a pencil or crayon as small children, there were no hang ups about things being ‘right’. We certainly didn’t need a reference to look at when drawing a house. We put down things as we understood them – almost in symbolic ways.
Houses had roofs and chimneys with smoke. Trees were simple enough once we did the trunk the rest was easy. Clouds were a sinch and those fluffy curved clouds actually gave the sky some reality. Birds were a must and were deftly handled with a couple of strokes. People were often just stick figures but everyone knew what they were and dogs and cats were easily recognised, also who can forget the sun with its radiating lines – it made for a happy drawing!
As the years pass we get more concerned with how ‘good’ things look and when we take up art in later years we seem to be most concerned with perfection of detail. We go to great lengths to get things correct, like tracing and other methods of transferring a correct image. The more we do this, the less chance there is of something artistic happening.
Our trees need leaves, our houses need bricks, our birds need beaks and so on – the quest to replicate everything we see in glorious crippling detail can the ruin of artistic endeavour.
It’s well worth looking at the many paintings that can be found online with websites like Pinterest and even Facebook just to see how artists get around the grid-lock of the tiny brush. Some of the works are energised by their simplicity and stories are told with a few brushy words instead of pages of laboured ‘explanation’.
There is joy and exploration to be had in artistic pursuits, but it’s not often found in the arduous journey of trying to getting things right.”
Happy painting