The lack of subtlety and understatement is undeniable. It is particularly shocking because the artists have all chosen spring as a theme. Spring is bright, energetic and intense but it is also the most delicate and the most vulnerable season, when young life and weather are as fragile as each other and the world is as full of doubt and false starts as it is of optimism and growth.
While obviously a range of quality is present with a decent painting or two tucked away in there, the vast majority of the recent things which pop up are just intense colour upon intense colour with little variation within a painting from one passage to another. I believe this to be a fundamental problem which dooms a painting to failure. I don't know why it is so widespread; perhaps it is the lack of painting teaching within art colleges, a mis-understanding of what Impressionism was that is now so widespread that it has become fact, a reflection of the "bigger, brighter, louder and more instant is better" culture we live in or (as it I posited in my last post) a side-effect of fashions in paint manufacture.
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I see this manner of painting as problematic because no matter what it is trying to be it is falling down. If it is trying to be realistic, it fails to realise that the brightness and intensity present in the real world is about variations in luminosity, not high levels of saturation - see this little sketch by Baron László Mednyánszky as an example (told you I was looking for spring pictures I hadn't seen before!) There are no ludicrously intense colours here, just careful mixtures and juxtapositions and the brightness of the canvas shining through and yet the painting appears both far more intensely coloured and far less garish than any of the multitude of day-glo blossoms Google fed me.
Equally if the Google paintings are just taking pleasure in intense colour, some sensitivity of handling and boldness of composition would help. This time I draw your attention to a painting by Ernest Lawson - this dazzling, eye-burning panel is effectively three stripes of blue-green and three stripes of yellow-green given form by marks, textures, specks of complementary colours and delicate changes in luminosity. Again, it is both brighter and less garish than my initial discoveries.Perhaps you think the paintings at the top are an attempt to build on the work of the Fauves and Pop Artists and apply it to a traditional genre? Such things require extreme skill, extreme discipline and usually extreme simplification, all of which are lacking. Matisse only hit his absolute peak as he became too old to paint and as he simplified his work dramatically. Look any random piece of his: all the colours work together (both through harmony and discord) for a common aim whereas in many of the Google paintings the different colours and passages are just fighting each other for the viewer's attention.
What it boils down to is this: where has all the subtlety gone? Many of the paintings I started this post with appear to be emphasising speed of execution over careful consideration. Is this what their makers chose to do or are there chronic limitations in the ability of the current generation of retail (and to a degree contemporary) painters to handle colour and a desperate lack of understanding of light? If they did chose to rush, what does that say about the art market today?
I would like to end with an appeal to painters around the world who cater to the retail market: please slow down, consider your work carefully as it progresses and give your paintings a treat - lavish some subtlety upon them. They will be grateful, and they will reward you.
A lot of it is simply a lack of taste coupled with aiming too high. As you said, it's difficult to paint with high chroma and do it well. Wouldn't it be wonderful if every painter could produce Van Goghs that are as compelling and perfect as the originals? Good luck!
ReplyDeleteI'll take one of his garishly-colored paintings over most drab landscapes any day (and wish we could still see the cochineal and carmine we used, since it has faded away). At the same time, I dislike most "loud" paintings because they lack his level of talent.
Some vaunted high-color artists I don't care for at all, such as Gauguin. I think his paintings, with their blob shapes and other annoying qualities, are ugly. So, some of the taste is also personal. I recognize that people can like Gauguin's art. That's fine so long as I am free to dislike it.
My mother is a palette knife oil painter and she has always favored realistic color. Some of her paintings are very bright but she painted them in full sunlight in Florida where flower gardens were in bloom. Compare them with her Lake Erie paintings and most of them are starkly different. If an artist decides to try to create a reasonably accurate depiction of the light and color in a scene, unless the artist is colorblind (or is a hapless beginner), that's what they'll get.
Sometimes it's also not skill as much as it's that the person got there first. Kandinsky is reasonably good example, with his famous sloppy squares of color painting as the best example of his — although there are much worse examples of craftsmanship these days (such as 'emperor/empress has no clothes' canvases covered in just one color). But, really... if a contemporary artist who is unknown were to produce the same Kandinsky squares and show them to people unfamiliar with art of that period and after, they'd likely be dismissed as hacks.
I don't blame the materials. We actually are lacking the most intense green, true emerald green, which was the bread and butter of painters like Cezanne and Van Gogh. I have used the real stuff and it is, when fresh, brighter than any phthalo mix imitation. We are also no longer able to get the real manganese blue, which is a more vivid cyan than its imitations (more so in watercolor). In fact, I find it amusing that so many paint sets come with two browns and not a single bright purple (like cobalt violet light). It's as if the world cannot see bright violet. I find palette after palette devoid of purple.
Bright pigments can easily be tamed. Getting perceived chroma out of dull pigments can certainly be done but only to a point.