Art School 007
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Art School Seven

Physical Form

When drawing forms, think in terms of angles and planes, not in terms of cliché. Concentrate on changes of direction to solidity of form.

Here's where measurement comes in. Use the analytical. Gauge angles and lengths. However one must also bear in mind the synthetic: such things as perspective, the governance of certain sets of rules concerning things as foreshortening and shading and highlight.

It's not so much the shape we represent in the drawing as the form. The work of art is in this respect like a re-creating of what is depicted in the representational style. It isn't as though the artist is copying what is being drawn or painted, but rather what is done in the work is a way of assembling what is being represented by the work of art. It's a kind of constructing process in which the artist by the act of creativity in representationalism is assembling the thing observed in his or her work of art.

This is why it's useful to study physical objects such as statuary. This becomes a vital exercise in assisting the artist to get a grasp of what needs to unfold in the process of representational drawing or painting, which everyone must do at least a bit of to grasp essentials. It helps because you can then get away from the cold representation of only what is seen; a copy of the image sensed on one's retina, as it were, but rather, by getting involved with the volume of the actual form it helps the artist to get a better concept of representing form in his or her work; it helps one get a sense of the structure of the subject of the work.

It even helps to handle the statue or the objects in the still life in that it better helps to convey in the artwork the sense of the tactile.

The planoangular alterdirectional analysynths recrofacto, tennioassemblage, and visioapendization, sinretenoidly structurae.

A form becomes a planoangular altidirectional. A drawing of it becomes either a mere cliché or ideally an analysynthal recrofacto which has the qualities of being tennioassembleric, visioappendic, and sinretenoidly structuralic.

Sinspect realitaplans spatialiniopointsindescript teniotransversoblique mergorm.

The cubist movement built upon form in a departure from the artifice of the conventions of painting of depicting a scene from reality.  They simplified the rules of perspective and so on, using only one-point perspective.  The subject matter was to appear as if lit during day time instead of the more complicated lighting sometimes achieved in the studio by earlier artists such as Ingres, David, or Rembrandt.  

They shared ideas that often occur in circles of artists from time to time, that of the possibility of portraying alternate existences to that which occurs in the real world.  But in order to do so, they would have to simplify things, at least at first, and they must have realized that the result would appear bizarre and facile to those unaware of what they were trying to do.  But the result would be a legitimate part of reality and in fact an addition to it.  And after all, adding to reality instead of merely copying it is the true vocation of the creative artist.

In art history, such as the so-called Rococo period, art had served a function of freezing views of the real world in a romanticized way onto the picture plane in a highly stylized and elaborate manor.  But eventually, in the nineteenth century, coming to the realization that art would now have to go beyond into more than a presentation of mastery of technique, artists like Courbet and then Cézanne began to work outside the envelope of mere skill in the application of style.

As if a great equation was being solved throughout history, as mankind graduated from depiction of superstition and idols, and then got out of the rut of having to cater to religious patrons who wanted pictures of themselves kneeling with saints as public relations stunts for the folks back home, finally, after art progressed to the depiction of reality itself in landscape and portraiture, artists began to bump into a vast glass ceiling.  The equation was solved, there was nowhere else to go with it and anything they did further would be repeating history which is what the contemporary realists of the early 21st century are doing now because they're just getting bought off by the gas-guzzling got-rich-quick airhead hustlers who know nothing about art except that it in their stilted plebian opinion, merely copy reality.

Fortunately for all of us, Paul Cézanne had a good dad, wealthy enough to give him a place to work and a grub stake, because at that time, a lot of other artists were dying off by causes related to malnutrition, and we lost them before they could really get somewhere.  In order to get beyond, they would have to endure quite a bit of rejection and often deadly privation.  Ironically today, their canvasses are each worth a fortune and some cannot be bought at any price, not because of the greatness of their achievement, but because art, particularly done by someone of note, if it pass the magic one-hundred-year mark, becomes the ultimate of antiques: a fine art antique.

A bit of actual art history for you there.

So Cézanne could then go ahead and start crossing a few barriers and he did.  People criticized him because he often took so very long to complete a canvass.  Often when doing still lifes he would take so long that he'd include the withering of the fruit and vegetables in the scene.  He had come out of the school of the impressionists as others had such as Gaugin, who worked on flattening and abstracting the image, Van Gogh, who expanded into passion and expressionism, and others who skirted the borders such as the primitive artist, Henri Rousseau.

So the equation began so long ago with the advent of the Florentine and Siennese schools with Giotto and Chimabui and then the Renaissance, so-called, and the advent of the classical artists had run it's course by the nineteenth century when the impressionists arguably took it to it's last extreme.  Now in computer generated art, we understand that the application of the technique of impressionism is really more like the filters we use to portray a subject in an entirely different way.  Human beings, too, can master these "filters" in a way, and if so, then possibly the Renaissance tradition can still be carried out in thousands of different other ways.

So then, as the cubists saw, sure you could have variety.  How quaint.  But variety was not progress.  So up to now, it hasn't happened.  Well one day this Spanish kid, Pablo Picasso, picked up a fabulous, wild, unabashed and sort of garish painting in the Paris Flea Market cheap.  He got round to actually meeting Henri who became a big influence on him and probably helped get him out of his melancholy blue and rose periods.

I don't know how much influence Pablo's dad had on him, but he was a professional artist, doing sort of lovely painting on a rooftop mostly with pigeons as subject matter in subdued mauves and grayish tones.  There was also a sense of melancholy that Pablo was in a way emulating.  But then perhaps with the help of Rousseau, he perked up and with his friend, Juan Gris and others, began to simplify the work; take it back to square one, so to speak.  Thus freed up, they could expand in another direction away from perfectionism and style and begin to penetrate that glass ceiling of old timeie renaissance hutzba.

Now, you have to realize that it's possible for the collector to get hustled, here.  A lot of fakes could then penetrate the art world and set up a slap-dash racket and get rich off of the patrons who grabbed anything abstract just for the prestige of being way-out, cool, hep, hip, avant-guarde and a bunch of other social things that have nothing to do with art.  That's probably why those movements seem to have died out and museums just aren't what they used to be even though they've got the same sorts of stuff in them.  It's simple: spot the hustlers, bypass them, then bring in the real artists breaking the barriers or you'll fade out with the relics of the past.

By the late 20th century, art went the way of the Rockwell and that Wyeth dynasty of flaky moody realism, or worse, simply slumped into the macabre with an army of black-suited in-crowd cliques doing realistic horror pictures.  As you can tell by now, I'm not very impressed.  They'll probably sump back into the use of stylism to produce photo-sharp tripe of the old bronze age idol stuff, realistic scenes of somebody's idea of the earth springing forth from a hair from the armpit of the great yeti or something idiotic.

Many mocked Rousseau as a primitive, especially with his fondness for invention and inclusion of the exotic in his work. But the effect was to achieve a sense of realism all the while completely ignoring visual convention by means of his characteristically unabashed lack of sophistication while leaning almost totally toward factualism. The palm tree was going to be in there no matter what. The lion was going to sniff the dreamer in the desert nocturnal scene even if realism were to suffer a bit.

The cubists began to work on a conscious concerted effort to break free and begin to work on something new just as the Renaissance artists had broken away from their past, but now it must be in a radically different way.  They elected, among other things to try to do away with perspective while still incorporating spatiality into the composition.  Of course, now you know it's all history -- art history and so the academicians got in there with their folderol (or as the French goes "fol du roi", the folly of the king) and superfluous verbiage.  So we don't know that much about what really happened.   At least I don't.  Maybe there are some personal diaries and journals out there somewhere that someone kept somehow.  They did seem to be sort of meticulous.

My impression is that after a while those boys were just having a good time with it as that's the way with artists when they really get into their work.  By and large they were really on to something.  But you have to remember Picasso was in the movement and he was a sheer genius.  That guy could have made anything work.  The funny part is to watch the scholars trying to explain cubism the way they used to with all the hype and technique of babble and verbiage that went on during the pre-impressionist era with all their usual vernacular.  Picasso was a threat to them because they couldn't explain him away.  

If you ever had the real story of art history, it would have been a heck of a lot more interesting than all the filler the scholars used to describe technique.  Sure there was some technique, but a lot of it was the genius and personality of the artist.  In a way the academicians really killed a lot of fine art with their inflated and hypothetical jargon.  They made it more and more impossible to get recognized enough to make a living at art.

Actually, my favorite cubist was Georges Braque, but not because of his fabulous breakthrough so much but because of his unique and characteristic work.  No matter the technique, the personality of the artist shines through.  That sets the genuine apart from the fake.  A real artist's work is recognizable without even having to check the signature.   Then the others come up with elaboration on technique that fill their textbooks and the weaker artists swallow that stuff and resort to trying only to mimic the masters.

The reason why a great artist seems to handle a composition in the same way each time isn't as much due to technique as it is the essence or personality of the individual.  There comes a point in your work when you've got to stop worrying about how you're going to set about being an artist and just be one.  The uniqueness in the painting isn't that much in the skill or the execution of styles, not even in the level of brilliance, but in the mystery of the unique complexity of the individual artist and the personality.  Without the scholars trying to cash in and muscle their unworthy way into the art world, there would have been much more great and fabulous art in the world today and art would have played a much greater role in human social well-being.

In a way the glorification of scholarship has killed civilization in our time and destroyed art as we once knew it.  Now all that's left are these filthy rich barbarians in their tickey-tackey castles demanding "realistic" artwork and for those who can afford it, antique paintings a century old or greater.  So all they got were cheap paint magicians who pull a sunset out of a hat and maybe the fortunate ones with their millions got some great art but they still didn't know it.

The cubists were trying to come up with something radically different.  As I was pointing out earlier, there is something to be said for the surface itself that is being worked on.  Before, everyone had been trying to treat the canvas or the paper as a sort of window the audience was supposed to be looking through, especially when the picture frame was invented and classical art became an obsession with making the spectator imagine he or she were looking through and peering out of an aperture on the wall, into a wonderful scene frozen in time.

So these boys, hanging out at the local café and so on, managed one of greatest collaborations since impressionism.  They were going to try as best as they could to portray space and distance all on the surface as close to two dimensions as they could get.  So what does that have to do with form?  The form is still there but not the way we would work it in our art school exercises.  We still need to study the use of the picture plane as a window into the distance.  You see, in my opinion, though it was a legitimate movement and the work was valid and significant, they really didn't get to where they were headed.

The rules were too stringent.  Picasso continued into his own unimitatable world and the scholars left him alone.  If one got too near he would get devoured, in a sense.  Picasso would pump them and cerebrally drain all thought out of them.  They would walk away semiconscious.  

He was astoundingly prolific.  Picasso's motto was "when I run out of red I use lipstick."  He became so great in his own time that once he turned a dollar bill into one hundred dollars by signing it.  He would buy a villa, fill it with artwork and then buy another and move to it.  It was villa nova.

Now, with the advent of digital art, we can begin to further explore what they might have been getting at.  Showing form without the conventional rules by flattening it and all else.  They achieved a spontaneity of presentation that brought the gallery back to reality by having the scenes therein depart from reality to become an addition to reality.

The portrayal of distance in the composition had to be done using a two-dimensional item: the line.  They also departed from realism in their use of color as well, and thus came up with something the connoisseur would realize, if he or she were being honest to themselves, was much more fascinating to observe.  They were taken out of the stifling boredom of the realists, who, except for the masters among them, became disturbingly mundane, though few would admit to it, as far as I know.  Maybe some did.  Maybe a few could fess-up and admit they were just in it for the money.  Honesty is the best policy.

Some like Daumier, who put life into his realistic pictures and prints, which he often sold on the streets as a colporteur of his own stuff, taking it from person to person to raise funds in a way others would have been ashamed to do, some like Daumier added life to the portrayal of reality.  But you see, once an artist has command of the skills, he or she takes them somewhere.  That's the beauty of it.  From work like his and perhaps Goya of Spain, would spring the idea of expressionism that others later would embrace, including me, but also artists known and reputable such as Munch.

So Daumier's departure from the norm, as it were, may have been derided by the academics of his day as exaggeration, but that's the problem with thinking too logically. In fact, anatomically, the skeleton changes shape under weight and stress, though it may not be that noticeable. Remember, the eye and the mind read a lot into the enormous flood of sensory input. What these artists were doing may have been an extension of that phenomenon, using the picture plane as an external tool to extend the capability of observation.

Degas was working with this as well in his efforts to depict human form.  He had to stretch his powers of observation beyond the relaxed poses of the studio models of yesteryear.  In fact it is said he practically tortured his models, usually dancers, whom he required to pose in difficult positions for hours which they normally would have executed in mere seconds on the dance floor. 

Others of the impressionists began to emerge beyond the "ceiling" they had run into.  With Claude Monet it was color, always color.  But as Pisarro said, it was possible to define form using only color.  Monet was once described thus:  "Monet is nothing more than an eye, but what an eye!"   

And of course, the one who arguably was the first of the cubists, Paul Cézanne, used shading to define geometrical form prevalent in nature.  All these helped the cubists themselves to depart completely from the norm and go all out in the search to find different ways to portray spatiality, ideally in just the two dimensions of the picture plane to create a whole new form of art never accomplished before.

Braque and Picasso even began to use other shapes in canvas besides the usual square or rectangle.  Some say it's because the corners gave them problems, but I don't think so.  They were, I'm sure, trying to go further than just the surface of the canvas by altering the shape of the canvas itself.

Actually, the human field of vision is sort of an oval anyway.  Not that that had anything to do with it.  But you never know, it was so long ago.  Almost a century by the time this article is being written in October of 2004.  

But suffice it to say the real artist is always looking for other ways to express form.  It's as they say, how you goin' to keep 'em down of the form after they've seen Parree?  By 2011, some of those rich airheads that hate cubism will be trying to pay millions for a George Braque with letters and numbers in the composition because by then such work will have crossed the hundred-year-old barrier and have become antique fine art: the king of all antiques.

It was that summer back in 1911 that George and Pablo got the idea of actually just painting flat letters and numbers into the composition at random.  Braque explained that letters and numbers  "...could not be distorted because, being themselves flat, were not in space and thus by contrast their presence in the picture made it possible to distinguish between objects situated in space and those which were not."   It was then that calligraphic elements became used successfully for another purpose than literature, that of representing flatness that assisted in representing space and distance while keeping the whole composition as flat as possible.  

That must have certainly flown in the face of intellectualism and scholarship.  Usurping their very tools to do other things randomly on the mute picture plane.  Who says flat will get you nowhere?

If you imagine it bizarre to place random letters in the picture plane, let me remind you that once the functionality of lettering was established, that was it. Humankind stopped working on their alphabets and just standardized them and forgot them. The lettering we are using in this text goes back thousands of years. Therefore it was highly appropriate that artists would feel that they needed to represent lettering as a part of a composition. It's too bad they left it behind as a phase or old-hat movement. We need to grow out or our antiquated forms of writing and the artist can begin to get us out of our rut. But all that has been lost now as art has digressed to a miserable and cheap form of realism in the early 21st century.

 --Fine art, digital art, music, several voice introductions by me about my work, articles about my artwork and other topics such as sociology,  the cosmos, economics, education, medicine, poetry, humor, something I call premonitions, and a series about covered bridges, all by yours truly, the webmaster, Paul A.L. Hall. There are feedback and exhaustive contents pages. Plus my weblogs are on site, an art school and classes.

In the end, the only art history you can rely upon is that you make yourself.  Then you can tell the academics to shut their traps before the world beats a path to their doors.

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yuck, yuck.