Discuss your favorite art and artists here. Post your own art if you like (if I am in violation of forum rules by saying that I hope one of the moderators can let me know and I'll amend this statement).
@Zuljaras I'd love to see some art that people make that visit this website.
Unfortunately I'm not that talented or creative myself. I like modern art a lot. Just gonna name some artists I really dig: Marie Louise Ekman, Jenny Holzer, Marc Chagall, Anselm Kiefer, Daniel Johnston, Odilon Redon.
I never had the confidence to do my own art stuff. I got my Advanced Higher in Art & Design (slightly above A Levels) but I was always more of a design guy. I loved writing my dissertations though, there’s something deeply fascinating about exploring art and its political and social surroundings. I studied Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus work, including his outfits for Das Triadisches Ballett, worth a watch if you’re on acid. I have a real love for futurism, artists like Boccioni and Balla despite the movement being somewhat linked to Mussolini. I also love Seurat as I tried pointillism
once and it was bloody difficult. I’d say my favourite artist was probably Hockney though, I adore his style especially the bright blocky stuff from the late 60s and early 70s. I was lucky enough to see A Bigger Splash at the Tate which was pretty surreal. I wish I could see Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) but it was sold to an unknown buyer for a shed-load of money so who knows.
@Zuljaras You can post whatever you want as long as it's art-related, I don't think we'll get into trouble - if we are told to take it down then we'll obviously have to.
"Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation." - Alasdair Gray
@nessisonett Hockney was born in a street in Bradford where some people I knew used to live near. Interesting guy, definitely rebelling against the status quo eh? A sort of Warhol, in a sense.
"Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation." - Alasdair Gray
Picasso and Dali are my favorite artists, loving the surrealism. I've written at length about Nadja by Breton in the Books You're Currently Reading thread as well.
"Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation." - Alasdair Gray
When I was at secondary school, I loved art class. I was good at fine, detailed stuff and would often fill my books with comic book characters, battles and whatnot (regardless of the subject). I had an art teacher who was super-supportive. She let me pursue whatever projects I wanted, and would bring in comics and art books from movies and the like. I consistently got good grades and encouragement. I thought that was it; I would become an artist, in whatever capacity.
Then that teacher left and, for my final GCSE year, we got a harridan who insisted on forcing her own perspectives on anybody who disagreed. She dismissed all my artwork as "over-saturated pop culture nonsense which doesn't mean anything" and kept giving me poor grades, despite my skills having flourished under the previous teacher's guidance.
So I gave up. All my enthusiasm for art evaporated, particularly modern art, which was her thing. One day, after having refused to do my homework (some kind of vague, "outside the box" experimental objective) I was sitting at my desk before class, absent-mindedly fiddling with an empty plastic water bottle I'd just finished. I crushed it and replaced the cap, then tore the label a bit. At that point, she walked in, so I stopped and, for want of a better place to dispose of it, just put the bottle on the desk in front of me.
She moved around, appraising everybody's homework with typical superiority, whilst I sat and tried to think of a reasonable excuse for not having done anything. When she finally arrived, she glared at me before noticing the water bottle and, I swear, she asked, "Can you explain your piece?"
Brain already engaged, I just shifted gears. "Oh, yes," I quickly blagged. "I crushed the bottle to represent the crushing oppression of the LEDCs we learnt about in geography, the Less Economically Developed Countries who are often forced to make our disposable products whilst they themselves live in poverty, and struggle for water. The torn label," I went on, in full BS flow now, "shows how society is tearing itself apart via its own hypocrisy, and how we're all inevitably headed for the trash heap."
All my classmates were screwing their toes into the floor, desperate not to blow my cover. They knew what I was doing. The teacher, meanwhile?
"Very good," she said. "Nice to see you do something substantial for once. B plus."
Once you've successfully hoodwinked a pretentious art lover by showing her literal garbage, your perspective on modern art becomes a little skewed. The whole experience undoubtedly changed the entire course of my life, but it's made me unquestionably brutal in my assessment of art. If something has taken time and talent to produce, I'm all for it, but these people who just put a red dot on a white wall and stand back from it, stroking their goatee whilst mulling their own genius, are self-important fools... and worse, the people who'll pay them a million quid for said dot? Even bigger fools.
I went to the Tate Modern once. They had a giant, empty room with a grand piano suspended from the ceiling. Every half-hour, the piano would explode; its keys, wires and components would fall out with a tremendous clash, before slowly being pulled back inside to recreate a complete piano.
Nobody liked it, because it was noisy and took thirty minutes to fully appreciate. They were all crowded around some famous dot on the wall, in another room somewhere, but I loved it. Once I'd watched it do its thing a couple times, I got up to leave.
When I reached the door, I paused, turned back and said "B plus" under my breath.
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
@RogerRoger My approach to stuff like squiggles on a wall is usually “yes, I could have done that in 5 minutes but would I have thought to do it? Nope, probably not.” I really love some squiggly stuff and loved the Tate Modern, especially a room playing about 400 radios at once, creating a strange buzz of audio that was hard to pin down. It probably helped that I had a really laid back teacher though, he would sit about and tell us about when he lived in Berlin in the late 70s to early 80s as a young gay artist, which was.. informative. His area of expertise was pop art collages so he probably would have loved the sorta stuff you were doing. It’s just a bit ironic that the teacher you had who loved modern art so much was dismissive of pop culture like has she ever seen a Warhol? A Lichtenstein? It’s a strange one alright, that sorta art started out as a critique of the cult of personality around traditional artists and then came to be defined by big personalities whose work sells for millions due to their name.
@RogerRoger I'm totally with you with regard to modern art. Unmade beds and piles of bricks and interpreting their deeper meaning is all nonsense to me. For me art is something that is visually appealing and requires a talent.
I own a few art books from games/films but also from Drew Struzan, Jim Lee and Stanley Artgerm Lau. Also a fan of people like Chris Foss. I dropped Art in favour of CDT Technology for GCSE and it's something I probably regret in hindsight. I've always liked drawing but haven't done so in quite a while. Maybe I will dig some of my art materials out of their hiding place and see what little of my already miniscule talent remains.
@nessisonett Oh, I hear you. And I'm fully aware that my attitudes have been coloured by a thoroughly nasty individual with a personality defect. Despite my sweeping generalisations, I still subscribe to the "I don't know if it's art, but I like it" approach when looking at pieces, and there are some thoroughly abstract works that I've given a second glance because they just "work" somehow.
But yeah, that teacher was a real snob, the worst example of an art elitist (and exactly the kinda person who creates the ironic cult of personality paradox you describe). She was defensive of her ability to interpret artistic meaning, almost in a "you can't properly appreciate art if you're working class" way. I found her attitude offensive, particularly since I kinda fall into the Rodney from Only Fools and Horses category, as somebody who can debate form vs. function and recognise Monet's use of analogous colours, but do so whilst eating breakfast in a greasy spoon.
Sounds like you had a much, much better teacher. Our gay teacher (he says, like every school was mandated to have one!) was in the PE department, so he and I were mortal enemies. Oh well.
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@BearsEatBeets Yep, same. I went the Graphic Design route and carried it forward to A-Level, but only because I wanted to retain an outlet for my fine, precise drawing skills. When we all started having to learn how to use CAD/CAM software, I walked away from it.
I've got a bunch of drawing pens around here somewhere, too. I haven't drawn anything in years!
"We want different things, Crosshair. That doesn't mean that we have to be enemies."
@RogerRoger Wonderful story! I enjoyed reading it and would have given you a high-five after class, had I been there. Only, I probably wouldn’t have been there since I avoided art classes like the plague and never considered myself much of a talent, nor much of a critic. Like anyone else, I like seeing art pieces that resonate with me, but I have no training to know why I like what I like.
I do think art is part innate talent, part practice. Given the time and effort, most people can create things of beauty, but it’s definitely easier for some. My recent foray into Dreams has me convinced I just don’t have the knack for it, but I feel like if I really devoted myself to investing time, then I could produce something decent. But it just would be really hard, and I don’t think I want to do hard things right now 😅. But I have a friend who can just sit down and draw a picture or create a piece that looks wonderful in a matter of minutes. It’s weird how talent works that way.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
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