Art and artists
mrs D is showing off some of the artwork done by her daughter Wendy.
it’s good work. it shows talent and skill. And something else: the ability to do good work even at a young age and not be a goddamned drama queen about it.
Mr Alger and i have had this discussion before. The “tortured artist” types who invent their own drama so they can “suffer for their art” drive you nuts.
Sure, there were artists whose private lives were full of trouble and it affected their art- but it’s like Charlie Parker’s heroin addiction. Heroin wasn’t what made Charlie great. imitating Charlie by shooting heroin didn’t make you a great Jazz musician. And creating suffering for yourself doesn’t make you a great artist. It just makes you an asshole.
Good for you, Wendy. Nicely done.
What I noticed about Wendy’s work is that it seems to reflect her age more than her artistic vision or technical competence. The landscape looks to be to be the most mature piece of the three, but even it is compositionally one-dimensional — still absorbed with found beauty, not yet interested in dramatic composition for its own sake, and miles away from being able to make a dramatic composition in found beauty.
Which, now I think about it, I’m going to go back and post at Connie’s.
M
I recall a statement from Robert Townsend about unwise imitation: the grande diva at the opera did not develop her musical prowess by drinking lots of heavy cream. But imitating the most visible and the most publicized characteristics of known “artists” is much easier than doing all that practicing and suffering all that criticism.
Well… Picasso was right saying that ordinary artists borrow and great artists steal. What he didn’t say (left as an exercise for the student, perhaps) is that the great artist — or even the merely very good one — has enough originality to, as Heinlein put it, “file off the serial numbers.”
I can point you to very direct influences on individual pieces of my own work — that you would never recognize in the finished piece. BECAUSE… what the source work said to me bears little relationship to what the lay observer might see in a surface viewing.
M
Your mention of Parker reminded me of something that pissed me off about Spider Robinson’s writing.
He had a habit of getting preachy about “So-and-so really messed himself up on smack/coke/whatever; what kind of terrible world have we made that creative people have to anesthetize themselves so?” My question to him would be “What the hell is wrong with some of these creative people that they seem compelled to screw themselves over?”