Assorted thoughts on art and artistic expression
27th of june, 2024
Believe it or not - I like art!
I have been drawing all my life to the point where it became second nature. I wasn't ever really good at it, but it's a skill that I have been failing forwards into improving. I would say that real cultivation of art as a skill came much much later, fairly recently. I do not have a formal education in Art which has its detriments, but I've made peace with it. This means that my artwork will always have this outsider[1] feeling to it. Not to the likes of actual outsider artists, of course, but you get what I mean.
Of course there is no way for me to be a complete outsider as I have been inseparably connected to the online art world! Nowadays i find myself resonating with the type of artists that many "on the outside" may consider unskilled or "bad". For example my favorite genre is seeing very un-rendered anime figures being put into lovingly crafted nature scenes or architecture. There is something so special in seeing an abstraction of a person made of icons and concepts be placed in a living breathing environment. I love it. And i love seeing which parts of a person or a scene the artist chose to depict and to what degree.
I am a very anxious person and art provides a lot of comfort for me, as i view making it as a kind of problem-solving or doing a puzzle. I get to choose the themes, the colors, what's the focus, composition and so much more! There are visions that i see and i need to figure out ways to make them real! After I switched to this mindset art was no longer a habit, now it is my favorite thing to do. I feel like it's noticeable from the outside too. This special joy of figuring out ways to make something. In that way I really like trying to make things very real. Not in a hyper-realistic ms paint portrait way necessarily. I think there is a relationship that expressionism, realism and surrealism maintain and true expression lies somewhere between them. Not in way that needs to be balanced, you can certainly lean towards one of them, but art truly becomes special when there's just a little bit of the other two mixed in :)
When I say "realistic" i don't necessarily mean as close to a photograph as possible. I want things to feel real! I like when things make sense. Maybe not all the time and not everything. I like drawing real plants that would make sense for the situation in the image. But i also like drawing non-specific greens so that the image feels real. Idk maybe I need to think about this more to explain properly.
I've began reading Rudolf Arnheim's "Art and visual perception" and he is very adamant about his idea that abstraction is not the pinnacle of artistic interpretation and it's all about realism. At first this feels like a very ill-informed opinion, but my interpretation of this (and please forgive my peasant way of putting it) is that us creating art in a way that we see the world and trying to depict the way scenes have manifested through the lens of our conscious and understanding is the truest form of expression. Not saying I agree with this 100%, Mr. Arnheim often goes back on his own statements so safe to say he has a lot of conflicting thoughts on the matter, just feels like there's something there I resonate with. I do want to depict the things I see and most importantly notice. The way a shadow lights up ever so slightly near its edge on a bright summer day. The way a shine from the surface of moving water blinds you. The way the moon gets a strange color on a particular night. The way the air smells. How do you depict that? My literature teacher was of the opinion that you cannot depict concepts visually, which is very silly coming from someone who understands metaphor and symbolism. I don't have the answer for this yet, maybe never will, but might as well try to draw a space which a specific kind of air would likely fill and the viewer just might get a whiff of it.
But who knows really, at the end of the day it's just anime characters and colored pixels and gif frames. Which is awesome even without all of this thinking.
[1]Outsider refers to a self-taught untutored artist that exists outside of commonly accepted art world and has no or little to no contact with it
as above so below